Deepest, Darkest Lomellina

Hell is an ice skating rink.....

2012-01-29T16:29:00.001+01:00

...due to unforcast cold snap.

The impossible happened.

I made a crafty thing.

As a hysterical displacement activity.

Cos MIL was discharged from hospital still psycotic.

Why?

Cos they x rayed her and discovered her hip has a hairline fracture.

Only in mental health do you leave hospital BECUASE something is broken, to the background noise of the health service frantically washing their hands of a geriactric, bed blocking, walking (well, wheelchairing), talking (without ever stopping to draw breath, possibly she has evolved to inhale through her ears thus ensuring the stream of warped conciousness never ceases for a millisecond) Medical Encyclopedia of Maladies.

But still, never mind, I shall not fall into a heap this time and not cope, having to slink off into internet hibernation while licking wounds and muttering darkly to myself, cos......look what I made (bursts with pride and fancies self as the soon to be discovered Picasso of the ...what is this decade? The teenies? S'not the noughties anymore is it ?

As the decade's artistic genius I want a special name for MY decade. /haughty sniff.

If you are on Pinterest tell me you handle so I can ~~stalk~~ follow you.

Where did the fecking spellchecker go?

Don't want upgraded blogger dahsboard if my crap spelling is going to be revealed in all,its dislecsick glory.

Dislecsick English teacher. It's like I set out to make life as hard as possible for myself (:

Nearly a year?

2012-01-19T08:28:00.001+01:00

I shut up for nearly a year?

A personal best.

Very quick update. Five minutes after I paid for all the books for the next school year Son of Thor decided he wanted to go back to school. So he did. And to cut a long story very short (for now) this is where he is going next year.

Inter High online secondary school.

Officially this is still home education so the testing, the being overseen by the school, the paperwork, it begins again. And it is still home ed where Italian epics\grammar\various other language arts, maths in Italian, Italian focused history and geography is concerned. But The Sock Dropper has really stepped up to the plate this academic year with homework. And discovered he is utterly brill at one to one teaching. Getting the child to not only learn in the understanding sense of the word, but also filling it with giggles and enjoyment. He is amazing at achieving the parrot fashion learning thing too, which should make exams easier. So I'm dumping all that on him next academic year.

The blog will now be focused on life as it happens, with massive school based whinges until June probably, then home ed, but also all the other aspects on my day to day headless chicken impression.

I just didn't enjoy being sucked into the home ed political, philosophical thing. So I want to step back from that and avoid getting pulled back in to the debates again by not identifying primarily as a home educator \ homeschooler. My son's school experience sucks, but that doesn't mean school sucks. Home ed is a great solution to our knotty problem, but it is not the One Great Educational Solution (IMO) and is not without its drawbacks, weak spots and risks.

I don't want to be boxed in by focusing on my being "A Something", not an expat, not a home edder, not a carer for a mentally ill person (back in hospital with mania, but she had a great Christmas, we slept for two days solid after she left LOL)...just a woman alternatively blundering, waltzing, dancing, clod hopping through daily life and trying not to fuck her kid up too much ( :

So I'll write about that.

And pilgrims.

Blog No More

2011-02-01T22:04:00.000+01:00

This blog is now closed.

I'm leaving up the content in case any of the info is useful for anybody, and the stuff that isn't useful I'm leaving cos I'm too lazy to trawl through it to delete.

I am not a freebie relocation consultant.

2011-01-19T13:14:00.003+01:00

Forgive the tone but I am deeply pissed off. One harpy has brought a simmering heap of resentment to a head.

Here is the deal. I am more than happy to answer emails from people looking for more information about home educating in Italy. I did it all by myself, in the dark, all alone and that experience has made me very pro shining a torch on the process.

BUT

I have a job, I home educate, I have a household to run and a geriatric, severely mentally ill mother in law to care for which at times can be overwhelming. The last, when a crisis hits, can be so time consuming that the three previous roles end up a bit squashed, meaning their recuperation is my number one priority immediately after things calm down. My bulging inbox is low down the list of priorities when the house is a tip, my son needs my attention in all spheres and my pile of student's homework to mark is towering.

So,

Rule one, have realistic expectations of me. I am not a home education fairy and your wish for information is not my command. There will be times when your wish for info isn't even anywhere close to being my priority. Just like you, I have a life and it can get in the way of my availability to answer questions. You number in the hundreds and I am just one (buzy) woman.

Rule two, like everybody else I get my share of spammy, speculative emails. Given the nature of my blog many of them will have generic "homeschool" or "home educate" subject lines. So if you want information please use "wanna home ed in Italy" in the subject line. I'll set up an email rule, so those emails go into their own folder, immediately separated from the piles of dross, which should eliminate the handful of emails that get buried alive, never to be opened under a pile of crap.

Rule three, of the hundreds of emails I have received a good number seem to think I am a freebie relocation consultant. I am not an American, I am an EU citizen, I haven't been through the process of getting visa's\work permits etc. and answering those questions is basically asking me to do the research that you should do yourself. Ditto claiming citizenship based on a relative having emigrated from Italy. Questions about employment, housing, lifestyle, dietary requirements are also well beyond my brief. Please ask those questions at the expats in Italy forum. I can only deal with the home ed questions, not cos I'm being shitty, but because I simply don't have enough hours in my day to research and respond with a detailed answer to emails where 3\4 of the questions have nothing to do with home ed.

Rule four, if you don't get an answer, first check that you haven't created a need for your email to be put to one side until I have more time to spare because you have asked an avalanche of questions that have nothing to do with HE, chances are if you did, I'll get distracted by life and forget it is lurking in my drafts folder. If it is just HE questions, you may well have written to me at a time when it has all gone bent and I am up to my ears in crisis management. Try sending it again in a week, be patient, send it again if you have to. I'm not ignoring you, I just haven't noticed you because a spitting, hissing, self destructive old woman in full blown mania having florid psychotic episodes is huge competition when it comes to catching my attention.

Rule five, if you throw a hissy fit because I missed your emails (that were 3\4 about relocation issues like visas, work permits etc), and the only communication of yours that I manage to dig out from the pile is the one where you liberally insult me for not doing your bidding on your timescale and attempt to hold ME responsible for the fact that you weren't in a position to take a job because you chose not to pay for time sensitive expert advice, well...your email address will be blocked. Cos life is just too short.

And I would caution against moving to Italy if you are going to get so wound up about missed communications from a voluntary, informal source. Boy, do you ever have massively unrealistic expectations with regards to Italian bureaucracy if you get apoplectic about a few emails slipping through the net. The "vanishingly rare"nature of home education in Italy means you have to have the ability to self direct and the personality that lets you take leaps into the dark. Because there is no huge precedent that goes before you, nor is there a well established network or association to closely support you. You are creating a need for a school to venture into uncharted territory, they probably won't like it, they will probably feed you misinformation, as will many other official or unofficial sources of misinformation. If you can't hold your nose and leap anyway, homeschooling here is probably not going to be within your comfort zone. Expat life in Italy possibly won't be either, in general misinformation is the rule rather than the exception in these parts.

Rule six, everybody else keep on asking what you need clarified. When I can, as far as I can, I'm happy to answer questions. Just bear in mind that I don't sit in front of the computer all day with my tongue hanging out in anticipation of home education related emails and cut some slack if you don't hear from me, because I'm probably dealing with a mentally ill old lady in a system where mental health provision is not seamless by any stretch of the imagination.

Rule seven, I'm not the only point of info on the web, this is great place to start, I know her, she is lovely, her English is perfect, in fact...go there first.

And here I will gather together the most common questions and attempt to answer them so those who need info in a time sensitive manner don't have to hang around waiting for MIL to be well.

Can I home school just in English ?
No. You have to do an Italian curriculum that is approved.

Can I unschool ?
Your child will be tested annually, if you fail two years running you will have your permission to home ed revoked. So yes, you can unschool, BUT only if you are 100% sure that the method will produce the results that the school is looking for in terms of reading, writing (in ITALIAN) and maths at any given age.

Are the rules different for children with SEN ?
Unchartered waters, since I don't know anybody home edding a child with notable SEN here. One school might be completely cool about it, another may kick up a right fuss based on their belief that you cannot possibly have the technical ability to take on their education. Unfortunately it is a question of "suck it and see what happens". You can always dereg from one school and register with another to try the process again if the first school is being difficult.

What if I'm only here for a short time?
Well then you are in luck ( =
The kids are tested annually and they have to fail two years running before your home ed status is at risk. If you are here for a timescale where it really doesn't matter if they pass or not, then once you've gone through the process of sorting out with the school that you are a homeschooler, just home ed as you see fit safe in the knowledge that you will be gone before it is an issue.

Can I home ed under the radar ?
Of course. However you will be running the risk of the police and social services on your doorstep. How much of a risk depends on so many factors like what kind of nieghbours you have, where you live (huge city v small town) and how gung ho the local school director is. Again you have to suck it and see what happens, on the basis that you think your risk factors appear very low and if it all goes bent you feel sure you can sort things out without getting sucked into the legal system. I am absolutely not going to recommend it, on the basis I don't want to get the blame if it all goes horribly wrong.

I need info on visas, work permits, employment, housing, dietary requirements, availability of SEN facilities....
You need to go here.
Unless you are demanding, shouty person who thinks you have a devine right to the info you want, being what you want, when you want it, on a platter in which case I think they'll probably tell you to bog off too.

Oh and to the ridiculous number of people who email me wanting to know if they can just come and stay with me for a few months, on the basis that we both home ed and they fancy a virutally cost free way of living in Italy for a bit,

NO, you cannot stay with me, I don't know you from Adam and the fact that you would ask a total stranger to put you up incidcates to me that I am not going to be your cup of tea.

boots

2011-01-03T14:36:00.000+01:00

Please excuse mess, am going to funeral, not cleaned or tidied.

Just concentrate on the boots.

And yes I know my legs are too skinny for them.

But I like them anyway.

Lick my face, or I won't cry.

2010-11-14T03:26:00.000+01:00

A few years ago my father in law died. At lunchtime. In August.

Have you ever tried getting a funeral director quickly in Milano at that time, during that month ? Fat chance.

The paramedics had made a mess, it was an emergency, that it just how it is.

My father in law was a proud and dignified man.

The only practical thing I could do to help my husband and my brother-in-law was spare them seeing him at the end of his life disheveled and stripped of his dignity. So I washed and dressed him. Not something I was every culturally prepared for, but it helped that I knew, that if he knew, he would have appreciated being touched and handled with respect and care.

And I don’t think I cried, I just did it, it felt right and I knew I was doing the right thing and I was the only family member who could it. I liked having something useful i could do that made things better,or at least stopped them being worse.

And yet tonight, when Rosie, my littlest doggie, my first ever doggy, slipped away like we knew she would, I buried her with no stiff upper lip to be found.

If you had given me the scenarios in the hypothetical I’d have told you that I simply couldn’t do the first, cos I’d fall apart at the seams, and the second would be easier cos I have had to bury pets before and the first cut is the deepest.

But I was wrong. I haven't built up any immunity at all.

Maybe I just like animals more than humans. Although I don’t think that is true. But maybe I don’t know myself as well as I thought I did.

Or maybe I can only grieve openly and unreservedly if a enthusiastic face licking and trying to trip me up twenty times a day is part of the relationship.

Mario already leaves his clothes lying around everywhere like deathtraps. Maybe if he slobbers on my face instead of kissing me in the morning he’ll up his chances of a properly mournful widow.

Cos I have already decided he is going first.

Because I want to lay him out, so the last hand that ever touches him on this earth is the one who loves him the most.

Although I’m not sure he is too happy about his placement in the queue of mortality organized behind his back.

Do I make sense ?

Probably not.

Is my heart broken ?

No.

My son, who will have some unhappy news in the morning, is snoring loudly, which means he is breathing and I have kept my sense of proportion.

I have a stubbed toe, not a broken back.

But it hurts, it really fucking hurts.

Am Queenie, pass the ermine.

2010-11-09T14:21:00.000+01:00

I just got crowned !!!!! (means my review was supperfabbydozy and a bit special !!!!!!!!!!)

For my review of Mudd Mask.

If anybody else want to earn a bit of pin money (also in the form of amazon.co.uk vouchers for us expats with no UK bank account) just drop me a line at my email address sarahfonto AT alice.it)

This is fun ( =

I've never done any sponsored posts cos
A) Never been asked to
B) asummed it would be boring and I wouldn't be that good at it.

I may have to have a rethink now I am regal LOL

Obvously I can't write straight so this is my slightly tittersome version of reviewing a product.

Advantages: works brilliantly if used regularly

Disadvantages: no "sparkle" and no jumbo sized tube option.

The Testing Ground....... for a pure clay, deep cleaning (with no exotic "dead sea" heritage) facial mask.

I've been using Mudd Mask as long as I can remember, at least two decades, but currently it is applied to a 42 year old face, which is being deeply unfair to its owner by suffering from blemishes PLUS wrinkles.

Rather than combination skin it is more what I'd call "downright fickle about what state it wants to be" skin. It randomly changes from fairly dry in places (with oh so attractive flaking) to quite oily for my age group.

The face still gets spots despite its advanced years, in the main caused by environmental factors. Like getting covered in a fine layer of ash daily when emptying three big fireplaces.

Also gets a fair bit of garden ground in to it, thanks to my struggling with neurotic pumps down wells. Usually in the dark, while it is raining. Ending up with me falling flat on my face cos the Italian Sock Dropper has wandered off with the torch for fear that his Armani socks might get a bit damp. It's not helped by me sometimes falling off the non smoking wagon due to the stress of an extended pilgrim invasion.

The above guarantees a lack of effortless clear skin. I'm at constant risk of blocked, oversized pores, blackheads, small angry zits and when the ciggies get thrown into the mix...massive acne like spots too.

(God I sound attractive. Almost feel like throwing the Mudd Mask away next purchase and just sticking the bag on my head.)

The instructions on the tube are really sparse, so I've gone into more detail to give an idea of the use and what the product is like.

Pre application

If you don't use it regularly the mask is almost TOO effective at deep cleansing and drawing out impurities and for the next couple of days after application some new spots can pop up to join the ones you were trying to get rid of. So I'd say avoid using it a couple of days before a big event if you don't want to risk "post mask breakout" angst.

You need to rinse and dry your face to clean it first, in my experience steaming and other complicated prep makes no difference to the effectiveness of the mask.

Application

This product can separate a bit in the tube. At first squeeze you risk a sudden squirt, of what looks like a bad case of food poisoning affecting the lower digestive system, shooting all over your basin. Over time this squirty phase can mean the remaining product gets too dry and clumpy. So always shake the plastic tube of the Mudd Mask violently before you unscrew the lid.

In two decades I still haven't worked out which storage conditions cause this. I've kept the tube on window ledges, in total darkness (lost under laundry mountains in the bidet), in the wide variety of climates offered by Southern England, Yorkshire, Bangkok and various bits of Northern Italy. Makes no difference, it seems to separate according to its own personal agenda, when it feels like it . So good idea to always shake.

You squeeze the product onto your hand. How much can depend on the weather (on a hot and dry day a too thin layer on the face can cause a strangled yelp as your skin gets sucked backwards at warp speed 10 with no warning).

You also have to think about the size of area you want to cover and if you wish to use a slow drying facemask as an excuse for a quick nap.

I go for a pencil thick line, about as long as my palm diagonally, so I'm looking at something that resembles a shrunken, three day old decomposed slug that caught the sun. Greeny brown, a bit moist still, with a suspiciously clumpy texture. Luckily it doesn't smell of dead slug. Just a subtle, clean, but earthy, natural scent.

I stick my finger in the slug and apply generously to the T-zone. Just enough to cover the skin completely, not so much that I look like my face is melting.

The eye area needs to be given a wide berth, I aim to look like the negative of a deeply shocked panda.

To the rest of my face I apply what little product is left on my hand much more thinly, just a whisper of coverage. Unless I am having a random dry and flaky phase, then I avoid the more dehydrated areas, like cheeks and neck, altogether.

Processing

I have a low boredom threshold, so during the wait for the mask to dry I creep up behind my unsuspecting spouse, yell "GWWHAHWHAHWHA !". Then wet myself as he shrieks like a girl and leaps ten foot in the air at the sudden sight of my "Shrek's swamp" coloured, monster face.

About ten minutes of hysterical giggling later, more or less, I get the "Joan Rivers" feeling and know the mask is dry. It is uncomfortable cos the dried mask pulls on your skin and makes smiling, let alone laughing quite twingy.

That means the end of fun and games, so I pull my husband's fingernails out of the ceiling, lower him to the floor and then pootle back to the bathroom.

Removal

I rinse vigorously in warm, running water for what feels like a month of Sundays. Paying attention to creases as it tends to get stuck there. It takes ten times longer to get off than it takes to get on. If I'm having trouble getting it off completely I have to use a bit of facewash along with the elbow grease. It feels like you are getting nowhere for ages, and then suddenly it all starts to come off and you are finally done.

This is why the packaging says to expect to be a bit pink afterwards I think. Nothing to do with the mask in my opinion and everything to do with the effort and rubbing involved in getting the stuff off you.

Moisturize, abundantly in my random dry areas post mask, to avoid feeling tight around the gills.

Results

I always see an immediate, vast improvement in pore refinement which lasts until I get hot and sweaty cooking dinner, but for two to four days after that my pores still look clearer and tighter than before the mask.

Over the next few days the old, odd spot usually speeds up their disappearance. A few zits can suddenly pop up within the next 48 hours or so, which is why I avoid using the mask a few days before a party. I always find that, when washing and exfoliating for the next week, any stubborn clogged pores and blackheads liberate themselves in a jiffy.

Used regularly for a couple of months I find I hit a point where I can maintain fairly clear skin by preempting any breakouts by keeping my pores clear of what would have caused the spots to develop.

Verdict

I feel the product only really lives up to its full potential if you use it as per the instructions. Which is regularly enough to get past the "post mask break out" cycle, so it can function as a preventative, refining measure, rather than trying to manage spots and blackheads with it in an ad hoc fashion.

When I do maintain the routine for 8 weeks onwards my skin is brighter, cleaner looking, fresher, less break out prone and far freer of blemishes. It also helps refine the general texture of my skin, which helps my make up sit better allowing it to enhance, rather than struggle to cover up.

Niggles

I'm married to an Italian who has the famed defective gene that leads to ever optimistic, excessive bottom grabbing. Given the heightened risk I run of being hobbled with my tights half down and falling over in my efforts to avoid third party contact with an unsightly bottom, Mudd mask is perfect for when my rear has been encased in jeans or tights for weeks of winter and is not at its silky, smooth best.

As long as I remember to turn up the heating, to avoid chilly fluffy bits during the process, nooks and crannies carefully excused from participation, I can get a lot nearer to a perfect peach texture compared to pre treatment.

Given this additional usage I feel the mask should also be sold in considerably bigger tubes. Especially if I've been hitting the cake.

The other whinge is that the Mudd mask is so very basic in cost, packaging and presentation, making no attempt to frilly itself up in any way, that it leaves me open to infidelity with posher, less effective products as an attempt to seek out a "pamper" factor. Which then don't work so I am spotty AND poor. I feel they could try harder to inject just a little sparkle into the product.

Conclusions

It might not be pretty, or flashy or "spa" like, but despite the low cost (or maybe because of it) it works, and gets the results I want in terms of clearer, healthier looking skin. Top and tail. It only costs me about 5 Euros for a tube that seems to last for ages (during the parts of the year when I restrict the use to my face only, like a normal person) making it fabulous value for money.
Perhaps because it is so "hospital matron" there is a lack of incitement to make a beautification performance art piece out of the its use. Which lends itself better to the busy life of a working, home educating, wandering hand avoiding, time crunched woman. Who needs to squeeze in her skin care in a day which could do with at least another six hours added to it.

Summary: I may cheat on it, but I always come back to my staid and sluggy, honest Mudd

Mumsnetitus

2010-10-21T12:07:00.002+02:00

I have it.

I can’t stop. I go just to have a peek and the next thing I know I’m embroiled in both a debate about home education v school and FFing V BFing, all at the same time (hey what can I say, I’m attracted to the “shoutier” debates)

This is not good for the house as I wander around listlessly flicking damp kitchen towel at epic disaster type burned on crap on hob. Muttering to myself, honing my next point, that I’m convinced absolutely needs to be made despite hours and hours of my life already have been spent on saying the same thing 50 times over.

What is it about the chance to argue the toss with other people that is so attractive ? It’s not like I don’t have plenty of opportunity to do word battle with the Sock Dropper, at length, in my own home.

I have a horrible feeling that this is the final proof that I am a grumpy old woman.

Cos as a hobby I actively seek out situations where I can vehemently disagree with people and make my disagreement known.

Which means any minute now I’ll probably sprout a floral pinny, a tight perm, a mouth like a cat’s bum and feel the need to sweep the road outside my house all day to improve my opportunities to tut, huff, puff and look for the opportunity to have random rows with passersby.

Am I being unreasonable to conclude that this is the final phase of me transmogrifying from a shiny young creature into an old woman ?

Or is that just excuse making and what I really need is a 12 step programme to wean me off my addiction to ~~arguing the toss with strangers~~ debating ?

swelled

2010-10-11T10:06:00.001+02:00

I was trying to persuade the honeysuckle to go up the fence and something attacked me...I think wasp.

My hand went down yesterday, but during the night it has come up again.

Thankfully I forgot to put my wedding ring back on after yesterday's swelling or we would be on our way to get it cut off right about now.

EKK !

Whimpering about how painful and itchy whole hand is, especially unfair when having to concentrate on properties of numbers.

I'm in the mood for ..IKEA

2010-10-03T13:04:00.002+02:00

My mood board, I went to IKEA on Thursday and got the bulk of the stuff I needed, matresses, bed linen, pillows, duvets etc and the Alvine pillow that is the central thing I have built the room around.

next to buy is the expedit and the assorted boxes to go in them for the long wall, I really like that vase on top too, wonder what plant that is and if do they do it in unkillable plastic ?

Considering using little Billys for bedside tables.

ohhh, nothing to do with the bedroom, but that pole arrangment I'm going to make for the hall.

This is going to form my fake vanity table, cos I haven't found a real one I like. Going to hang an oval mirror just above the table top.

My bed is now red, thanks to the Alvine influence, but I want the mosquito net.

Nearly there, just a few more hundred euros to spend and a husband to drive to distraction with my shopping obsession ( =

Junkie of the free software for kids kind

2010-09-24T12:36:00.001+02:00

Slobbers on screen.

NB, this is not a sponsored post. I found this myself and just started using it half an hour ago. Not that anybody ever asks me to do sponsored post (mega sulk commences). I mean why does nobody ever ask me ? I'm unimportant aren't I ?. Don't answer that please, a girl has to hold onto whatever minor bloggy self esteem she has.

Have found a really easy to use DTP programme that basically allows the kid (or overgrown one in my case) to use create a school project, a poster (printable or online), a newsletter....anything really ...... with some really nifty features like easy photo cropping and masking, recording your voice straight into the page (nice for cutting down on eons of text if you have a reluctant writer and takes into account the "speaking" objectives of the literacy curriculum) and animating just about any part of your project that you fancy.

And it is FREE !!!!

Here is a video to show you what it can do. If you are home educating I think you'll find it a great "ITC" alternative to lapbooks, unit studies, files of study note. If you have a kid at school I'd consider it to help your kid consolidate a subject whilst providing imaginative and interesting revision resources.

Given that I think this the direction with will be seeing more and more production software going any kid that uses it even occasionally is going to have an edge. Because it seems some schools (here anyway) are very much into using dinosaur age packages.

Swamped

2010-09-10T19:29:00.000+02:00

Knee deep in sorting out an IVA number (VAT), creating publicity materials, timetables, course outlines, tests to work out levels, book choices, pricing etc. etc. etc.....

My mini school is due to go live in just a few weeks and I feel like I am knee deep in quicksand.

If anybody has a spell as to how to create an extra ten hours per day and couple of extra days per week..I'd be most grateful.

On a more optimisitc note IKEA has halved the price of the tables I want for my classroom, so that's good.

Less fun is the eternal search for a whiteboard of decent proportions, cos the Sock Dropper has veetoed the interactive whiteboard until I have earned enough tax to be able to write off the cost...or something complicated like that, which sounds like him being a big meanie to me cos I neeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeed an interactive whiteboard. I love them, they are so much fun.(sulks)

Ohhh I wonder if I can count new clothes and a diamond necklace or two against "costs", I mean I have to have a certain image don't I ?

Aristocratic Art of Distraction.

2010-09-03T12:54:00.004+02:00

Why does a child have to die in order to generate enough focus and manpower for her siblings to be saved from protracted abuse ?

How many unaided and invisible children were left high and dry while one family suddenly got the attention and action they needed far, far too late ?

How come the social workers involved having an average caseload of 50, yes FIFTY, is given minimal attention ?

Why the current focus almost exclusively on home education as the key issue when the alarm bell was repeatedly rung by several increasingly concerned teachers, well before the children were removed from school as well as beyond ?

Don’t think for a minute that I have a blind spot when it comes to this case, caused by a desire to home educate unencumbered by regulation. I DO have a problem with the unanticipated (by the Italian state) issues that arise from the regulations I home educate under, but I am not HE regulation phobic by default.

I just can’t reject regs out of hand as inappropriate or unnecessary.

Not while I regularly breath a sign of relief that I was born in 68, well before HE was a known option. Thank God.

The idea of my mother coming across home education and being given a free rein makes my blood run cold. We’d have left the age of compulsory education as keen knitters and not much else. The only reason we were able to develop our own ideas, interests, opinions and personalities was because school gave us respite from a home somewhat oppressed by maternal personality and foibles. Nothing that would catch social services eye in of itself, but the potential to be educationally limiting and emotionally stifling from the children’s perspective none the less

So no, I can’t oppose the regulations I home educate under full stop. Although I reserve the right to fiddle with them (at least in my head), not to water them down, but because I’m pretty sure you could re-jig ours to take the curriculum sting out of them and sort out the “hostile, subjective and powerful” accountability environment for people, like me, who have had spectacular fallings out with the entity that oversees them.

With care, attention and consultation you can probably create a system that most of the time should red flag anybody who is off kilter in either welfare or educational terms, but which also goes to great lengths to avoid causing disadvantage to any particular type of home educator, other than the “loopholers”.

Yet a perfected set of regulations would still be absolutely useless as a safeguard if superimposed on a system of child protection that has been so battered and diminished by successive governments that it has fallen apart at the seams, to the point that it requires a lifeless child presented to it before it can react to an evident need of intervention.

There are children, pre school, in school, missing from education, in significant numbers who need immediate intervention today.

Just not going to happen while social workers are spread so thinly that they break…and then leave.

So the waving of a tragic case as a pretence that the sole issue is home education makes me feel ill.

Because the strategy is as transparent as it is devious. It is being employed to allow the same entity that systematically dismantled the safety net of social services, to kick the results of their decades long, lip service under the carpet.

How many more children are going to have to die or be irreversibly damaged before governments, past, present and future, take responsibility for years of “being seen to do something” knee jerks and focus their attention on putting social services back together as an effective, funded, supported and professionally run agency ?

If they don’t know where to start, try asking the social workers themselves. The eternal scapegoats when political policy comes to bloody fruition have no shortage of illustrated information as to how it has all gone horribly wrong and what can be done to darn a child protection safety net that is currently more hole than thread.

When you are talking about Khyra Ishaq, who hurtled through those innumerable, gaping holes and came crashing down in a lifeless, crumpled heap on the other side, how can you not make stitching back together the whole damn thing, for ALL of the children in harm's way, the absolute priority ?

Fix social services, as an absolute government priority, if you really give a damn about children at risk of serious or deadly harm..

I can live with my regulated status as a home educator in the main, but I don't want to have to live with headlines about children being starved to death despite alarm bells ringing, or toddlers being tortured to the point of a broken back until they die, under the noses of the very people who already have the powers (but not the manpower) to protect them.

So Dear Lord Soley, don't fiddle while Rome burns.

The Sock Dropper is a statistic

2010-09-02T21:53:00.005+02:00

We were in the car on a joint mission, pick up Son of Thor from centro estivo (they slotted on an extra week) and get me chocolate cos I'm a grumpy old woman.

To distract me from backseat driving Sock Dropper started to tell me about a radio show he was listening to that afternoon, something along the lines of how 15% of marriages in Italy today are mixed marriages, not the old style Southern bloke falls for Northern lass, but the more exotic Italian and "forrin" type. He was burbling on about this and saying that they were highlighting the problems that could happen so I arched an eyebrow and asked "So are you worried ?"

To which he replied "Me ?"

"Well you know, "mixed" marriages bringing their own issues to the table on top of the ususal stuff, are you afraid of being a statistic ?"

At this point an old biddy on a wobbly bicycle was at risk as he turned to gaze at me like I was a talking Martian.

"Wat da bloods hells you is speak abouuuut ?"

"you, you twit, being married to a "forrin" type, being in the 15% !"

He looked slighty stunned and then said "You have right ! Iz me also !!!"

So I'm a little perplexed.

Have I become so Italianized that he thinks I'm one of them now and has forgotten I'm "forrin" most of the time ?

Or is he under the impression it is typical of an Italian marriage for two people to yell at each other in their respective languages for an hour, only to discover that the entire row is based on somebody having utterly misunderstood what the other one said (in the "wrong" language) in the first place ?

Giving birth to "near dead" babies in Italy

2010-08-30T13:29:00.000+02:00

This set me off down an unhappy memory lane.

Doctors fighting over a labouring woman, déjà vu. Baby with a poor outcome, mum without a womb.

"Police were today questioning staff at a hospital in Sicily where a child was born with suspected brain damage after two doctors attending his mother allegedly came to blows over the need for a caesarean as she went into labour."

I had a doc and three midwives with raised voices, one midwife came in and sottovoce told my husband "for the love of god if you love your wife and child go and insist they do a C-sec, she (the doc) won't listen"

So he did, the doc came back in, examined me and yelled, "but this cervix is changing !"

Yeah I'd gone from three cm to three and a half cm in 24 hours of unrelenting, unmedicated agony and when they ran a check on my heart not an hour earlier there had been some very unhappy faces muttering at the main doc.

Sock Dropper won the argument. I have reason to be grateful for that.

I had been chatting in the nearby bar almost daily with the owner, who was almost as pregnant as I was, for the last six weeks or so before our due dates.

I went to see her at work with my few week old new baby as promised. She wasn't there. But was on her way and her husband asked us to leave before she arrived. Their baby girl died after they turned off the machines. Her husband told us that it had been chaos, with one doc insisting on going ahead "naturally" with the other screaming for an emergency C-sec now. The C-sec doc had been ejected from the room. The baby was born vaginally an hour later with devastating brain damage. Later on I saw in the local paper that the doctor underwent disciplinary procedures because all the evidence pointed to a C-sec having been the only reasonable conclusion far, far earlier in labour.

Then I moved here. There are three children around Son of Thor's age with not so mild to extremely severe disabilities, I know their mothers in different contexts, one is the daughter of a neighbour, one was a mum with a kid in the same year group, one is a friend of a friend. In every single case the unifying factor is rows between medics during labour, where one held out for "natura"l and somebody else pushing for a C-sec that either didn't happen, or happened too late. They all 3 received substantial damages as the system concluded that the hospital was at fault.

So I hate all the angst over "C-sec rates and percentages".

By all means challenge unnecessary C-secs performed on women who neither need or want them.

But don't make it numbers game or all about a philosophical revulsion for them.

Look at the individual in front of you and think about what she and her baby needs right here, right now. Cos if that isn't the priority then examples like those above are going to keep on happening.

I joke about how I only have one kid because he was an insomniac, and it is not without some foundation. But the real reason why I couldn't face the thought of another baby was the birth. I have no issues with having had a C-sec, I was so desperate at that point that if you had told me that hurling me out of the window from the 8th floor would stop the pain and make sure my baby was born safe and sound I'd have signed off on it.

My problem with risking another birth is that I have "flashback" issues at being scared to death that both of us were going to get hurt or die, because at no stage in my labour did I feel like we were the point. We were most decidedly in the back of the queue behind birthing philosophy and hospital statistics.

I am pro more choices for women in birth. From HBAC right through to chosing to have a C-sec from the onset. What I am not up for is swopping one hard line in the sand for another and pretending that humans are carbon copies of each other so it will work out just fine for everybody.

Women and their babies should not have to risk being collateral damage for somebody who has picked a one size fits all approach to all their patients.
If we want to change birth to make it truly a feminist deal where there really is a choice and genuine, unbiased guidance and information is available from the onset as well as during labour, then we need to make it about women and their babies and not about loaded labels like “natural” v “unnatural” or lists of statistics that may bear no relation to an individual with so very much to lose.

Birth should not be a “political” arena where medics wrangle about their preference for “lifestyle” choices.

Oh FFS, I'll just post it here then...

2010-08-28T15:47:00.000+02:00

this is my response to the debate on another blog, because blogger softeware is eating my posts and I will WIN dammit. I will not be silenced by an evil glitch that thinks I should be mopping floors instead of obsessing on the internet.

Eaten comment commences below

___

" How on earth will this 'put off' new home educators?"

I normally refer interested people to your blog first, tell them to make sure they read the comments and get back to me with the ones that resonated most for them so I can hook them up with blogs and sites most suited to their tastes.

I kind of got the impression that people were pleasantly surprised to see we aren't brainwashed, "cultish", "group think" people, that in reality we are perfectly capable of hotly debating the finer points of our educational choices, rather than coming together exclusively in self congratulation or self defense.

I know that when I found your blog the huge range of issues pulled in via comment fast tracked my "education" as it were.

It let me access a range of ideas that wouldn't have occurred to me as I was knee deep in the day to day struggle of managing a huge lifestyle change and without being prodded into debate I'm not sure I would have found the time or inclination to seek a better understanding of the huge spectrum out there at such a cracking pace.

Your blog is the reason that I am working in conjunction with another Italian HEer to try and work out a road map to make unschooling a more accessible option within our tight regs, as well as try and stimulate our rather scaredycat and conservative email group into being a little less reticent about opening up discussion with the DofEd about rewording the regs to open up opportunities for people to explore other avenues that lead to learning.

If my own knee jerk reactions hadn’t been challenged by discussion here I would probably have settled for making things more comfortable for myself and not worried unduly about the issues other people were having.

I do think that for the new HEer who is at a fuzzy stage when it comes to what they want to do and what their comfort zone is, lurking during the debates can bring up points within issues they may not have considered and allow them to make an informed and confident decision because they have had the opportunity to examine it from all sides, from a range of perspectives.

I tend not to be debating so I can convince the people I am posting to, I always figure the only people who might find any of my points valid or worth taking into consideration are the silent majority who read, not post. (Which is basically a thought process I use to silence the voice in my head saying “you are wasting time on the internet arguing with random strangers, AGAIN”, cos I can turn round and insist there is a higher puprose, I am only giving back because the discussions were so useful for me. Honest gov. Nothing to do with loving debate and hating housework. It’s a totally selfless activity. ( ; )

I think the only thing that might put off new HEers (or school users who are trying to understand HE before they make uninformed knee jerk reactions) is the undercurrent of hostility that spills over in hyperbole and insults. But that is hardly an issue that can be laid exclusively at your door. Each and every person who has chosen to get personal or vicious about things has to take responsibility for sometimes making us look like a bunch of hysterical toddlers bashing each other over the head with the nearest toy. Self included.

HQ HE Italia

2010-08-18T21:14:00.000+02:00

http://www.controscuola.it/

Oh yeah baby, we have arivvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvved !!

Founding a HomeschoolyEducaty Group

2010-08-17T21:08:00.000+02:00

After three solid days of house cleaning in preparation (it's a big house, it takes three days to get it clean even if it wasn't a tip to start with) today a momentous occasion took place.

Erika and myself founded the Pavia (today it is Pavia, but we are aiming for World Domination !!!) HomeschoolyEduGroup.

Erika is Queenie. Cos she is good with PR, like not telling journalists that evil bidellas should be rendered down for soap making purposes. I am chief procrastinator and official "~~wave arms hysterically whilst shouting in Italaish~~" Wise Elder

We had a brilliant day, mosquitoes eating us all on a nature walk notwithstanding. And I am so happy.

I am not all by my Todd, it is great to have somebody to commiserate, bounce ideas off and plot to improve our lot on a bureaucratic level.

The fact that she has bundles of energy, a great mind and vision is just a clump of cherries on the cake which I intend to eat and then make trifle with too.

I feel like a proper homeschooler now. Am off to post on homeschooly groups casually dropping "well in MY homeschooly group we did X, Y and Z and discussed W, P, ~~melting evil bidellas into soap~~ and T", instead of sulking on the sidelines while all the other home educators waggle their groupyness at me making me feel inadequate.

Oh yeah and thanks To Erika and her husband we also have a whizz bangy proper Home Schoolers in Italy website with like a forum and everything !!!!!!! which I will post a link to just as soon as I remember the safe place I saved it in

(happy dances into the kitchen to think about making dinner ..... and opens packets instead)

We have EXAM RESULTS !!!!!!

2010-07-26T13:12:00.001+02:00

Two and half hours of written exams with no break.

And this is the result.....

For those who don't understand Italian, he passed and passed well. (laudable, excellent, optimum)

He has not only passed, he has trounced his results from last year.

He is eating biscuits like they are going out of fashion and reveling in my sudden inclination to say yes to any request he makes. Which will wear off fast.
Off to frame the letter. Too tired to go into details right now cos I didn't sleep at all last night.

Taking stock of the first year home educating....

2010-07-24T22:52:00.000+02:00

Mainly cos I am forced LOL.

His exams are on Monday, so I had to go through all the folders, fishing out the programmes of study and a fistful of examples of his work over the year for each subject.

I have lots to show them on my Home Education Showcase, but I wanted some paper based evidence too.

So I sat, for what felt like forever, surrounded by piles of paper, plastic folders, files, books, projects and notes with no visible floor and for the first time I had the time and inclination to really take note of how far we have come.

His weakest subject leaving school was Italian. My greatest handicap is in teaching Italian. The biggest disaster we have had this year has been the lack of an outside Italian teacher because we had a series of people who dropped out, one after another, due to work\family\life \health crisis after either a long periods of total absence, or very spotty attendance.

So I put the Italian work together first to get it over with. I wasn’t worried that it wasn’t “good enough”, but I wasn’t tap dancing in anticipation of wowing anybody with his work.

His very first piece of Italian written work, in early September last year, was four short sentences to describe four related pictures. It is all in capitals, some letters are back to front, the punctuation was added on by request, accents and double letters all over the place, spelling...eclectic. The result of two hour hard work with much suggesting\hinting having been required in order to complete it.

I've placed it next to the short story he wrote last Friday when I gave him half an hour to think of a non-realistic story, plan it, develop both the character and the plot to create interest and then write it up.
The two pages of A4 side by side made me well up.
I hadn't realized how far he'd come.
It's like comparing day to night.

I don't care what they give him in terms of grades on Monday.

My heart is bursting with pride for my little boy who overcame his hurdles and has gone from fearful of making mistakes to the point of being unable to begin a task, to being someone who can take a demanding outline and from a cold start, run with it and come up with something that displays a creative command of the language.

I know that most likely they won’t look at any of the work I have put together for them.
Doesn’t matter, I’m grateful circumstances focused my attention on the gulf between last September and now.

I’m going to frame both pieces of work side by side and stick them on the wall in the hall so we can both see them a hundred times a day, to remind us that the tiny, almost invisible baby steps taken lesson by lesson add up to huge great leaps and we just have to make sure we give ourselves the chance to notice them.

Roll on quinta. Angst is off the curriculum.

He rocks at home education.

Mums are not thick.

2010-06-25T14:34:00.002+02:00

(even if this one is sick, sick as a dog, hack hack)

But we are bombarded with information.

And many of us do not know where to begin to sniff out bias, flaws, confusion in terms of correlation v causation, cherry picking in response to headline that says "Study Shows if you don't do X you are a BAD mum !!!!" Well alright, they don't come right out and say it, but it is often implied.

Bad Science and The Quackometer are good places to start if you want to be able to take your baby steps in working out what a study is really saying all by yourself.

But I am very, very ~~lazy~~ busy.

What I'd prefer is somebody else to do it for me, but writes in a way that lets me understand how they demystified the study so if I don't want to take their word for it i can go check it out for myself.

I've found this one,

http://www.parentingscience.com/

and this one

http://mommadata.blogspot.com/

and just found this one too

http://www.therextras.com/

If anybody has any others I am all ears.

Just as soon as I stop coughing my head off and feeling like puking and\or fainting is on my immediate horizon.

Tea and sympathy gratefully accepted cos the Sock Dropper (despite being able to walk, function, laugh, eat, whinge about being out of the world cup etc.etc.) is obviously so much sicker than myself and won't give me any in case I try and steal some of his "Officially the Real Sickie Wot is More Sick Than Anybody Else in the House" thunder.

The world and its mother...

2010-06-21T10:38:00.000+02:00

has suddenly decided it wants to learn English.

NOW.

Which is unusual cos aside from a few mini kiddie intensives this is a quiet time for me.

They must have heard I was looking forward to a nice child free rest.

So anyway dashing around looking for last minute inspiration I found this, most useful for TEFL on the run when it has all gone bent and you have no idea what you are going to do. I'd say most useful for low pre-inter and up

http://www.esldiscussions.com/

And for the lower levels I've been experimenting with audio lesson records. so far it does seem to be having a major impact not only on pronun., but also retention.

Here are a few I've just done.

The hardest part is recording your own voice without cringing at the result. The second hardest is gently underlining how the English "eat their words" without going at a wholly natural speed. These are a bit of a fiddle to make at the beginning, but I find I can knock them out in half an hour flat now including finding images and making the vids.

Getting to know you
http://prezi.com/wpm0dthy67ez/getting-to-know-you/

http://prezi.com/qcdd2nek7z_l/what-kind-of-do-you-like/

Airport survival
http://prezi.com/as-5dau_q_os/in-the-airport/

Dear so and so, The hot under the collar homeschooler edition.

2010-06-10T11:29:00.004+02:00

Yeah I know it is a day early, but I have to get this off my chest and I need the letter ready and refined for the morrow, cos today Sock Dropper has to collect his still sick mum from the hospital and I can't dump all this on him as wel,l so I'll do the writing and translating today and do the convincing in terms of sending it, on Friday.

Just hang on a minute, changes in the law makes this disclaimer on this post a must.

Disclaimer Questo blog non rappresenta una testata giornalistica, pertanto non può considerarsi un prodotto editoriale ai sensi della legge n. 62 del 7.03.2001.

The letter oddly enough, was provoked by yesterday's post below this one.

Dear Director ~~of the worst school district in Lomellina~~,

I am enquiring as to the reasoning behind the choice of July 26th for the examination of external students. Six weeks after the end of term.

As you may well be aware ~~well you would be if you bothered to keep abreast of research in education~~ there is solid evidence to support the conclusion that long breaks from education result in significant backsliding in terms of skills (reading\writing\maths) and seriously impedes the retention of information learned during the academic year.

While you yourself or your staff may not have seen said studies ~~because keeping yourself up to date with developments in education would steal precious time from keeping tabs on the terms and conditions of your contracts~~, I am sure both you and your staff can only imagine the outrage ~~and general hysterics on a national level~~, from the entire profession ~~who would have a collective nervous breakdown~~, were the INVLASI exams held on a date immediately after a six week break from the classroom, spent by the bulk of the student body in summer camp or away on holiday, thus decimating the motivation and opportunity for the self study needed in order to minimise a dramatic dip in the ability to demonstrate educational attainment.

I ask why you find it appropriate to put external students at such a known disadvantage when it is apparent to anybody ~~with three braincells~~ who has followed the teaching profession's ~~screeching, teeth gnashing, wailing, excuse making~~ reaction to the current reforms, that internal students would have been afforded an automatic, media covered, strident and vociferous defense were they too placed in such a disadvantageous position.

I am assuming that that the choice of date was not a deliberate act (conscious or sub conscious) ~~only cos I am trying to be polite and not get myself sued for libel~~ of retribution for the rejection of the state school system, but instead a mere oversight.

Do you intend to rectify this oversight ?

If not, what steps will you be taking to ensure the exams reflect the ~~bleeding obvious~~ undeniable reality that the external students have been indefensibly forced into a position where they are required to demonstrate equivalence in educational attainment without an equivalence in terms of testing conditions ?

I personally would find a far earlier date acceptable, if this is not possible a later date allowing for a few weeks of revision after the summer camps close would also be acceptable.

I will be forwarding this correspondence as it develops to the proveggione not cos I expect them to strain themselves and doing anything about it , but since their investigation about your misuse of funds I know any hint of them freaks you out, who can afford to be shuffled to another school again ? Ohh this would be the third one ! which means you'd get shuffled to the state educational provision for the handicapped, lucky them, being the wastebin of all the educational staff who fuck up so often that they need to be hidden where people are least equipped to complain about them with the intent to take matters further should a resolution not be forthcoming.

PS We will be on holiday that day AND he will be very very ill for a month, and since my BIL is in the medical mafia I'll give you all the medical evidence you need, sit on that and swivel you gitfaced thing you.

~~----------------~~

A huge thank you to those of you who gave me ideas and helped me feel less helpless and alone yesterday. An especially big thank you to Indie who spent so much time on facebook yesterday talking me down. Were if not for her I may well have lost the plot, picked up the phone and made things ten times worse.

Sill want to move, am absolutly going to find out how to change schools and work out to what extent my choice is limited when it comes to a replacment school (ie can I live here (for the time being) but be under a school in sud Tirol ?).

Flobbing gits !!!

2010-06-09T12:45:00.000+02:00

26th of July is our exam date. A whole morning full of exams, followed by an interrogation with three teachers.

Numerous, quality studies demonstrate that students regress significantly during long holidays.

So they chose to test the external kids, the kids who opted out of their system six sodding weeks AFTER school has ended. (the school kids did their tests last week !!)

Bear in mind that they are fully aware that those specific six week are those when the summer camps are on.

26th of August would at least give us a few weeks after summer camp to get him back into the swing of things and undo the backsliding.

But oh no, despite the fact that the entire teaching staff would throw a hissy fit on a massive scale if you suggested their students (and themselves by extension) were externally accessed (with prejudice) right after a six week holiday, it is just fine and dandy for the kids who rejected state school via homeschooling or unaccredited private schools.

Don't tell me this isn't a form of payback, to reduce our chances of demonstrating a better level of educational attainment outside of their school (bearing in mind that you can compare most of the kid's progress "in this local school" to "after they left this local school" via the school's own record keeping system, because the bulk of these children are outside the system BECAUSE of their experience in said local school).

Four years now this sodding school has been a constant source of angst, irritation and outright fury thanks to their sloppy, small minded, unprofessional mindset that places greater importance on the retention of state jobs over the education of children

They are jumping through hoops to avoid giving us an appointment so we can ask questions about the pitch and format of the exams. God forbid that we should have the kind of advantage in terms of past papers that they enjoy when externally tested via INVLASI. We wouldn't even know the date if we hadn't called for the appointment we can't have. They said they left a message on my (defunct) mobile. Considering this is a legal requirment I have to comply with surely the ethical and professional thing to do is either speak to me in person on the phone or send a registered letter to ensure I get the information. they've never had an issue with making me spend an hour in the PO trying to pick up a registered letter from them before now. For far less pressing matters.

My kid has worked his butt off for a solid year, we didn't kick up a stink when they wanted us to use their programme, we didn't make a fuss when they failed to give us the programme until January, he has gone from scraping by in Italian last year to successfully completing a prima media entry test this morning (Son of Thor is end of year 4, prima media test is beginning of year 6). Does he get a well earned rest like the other kids at school ? Does he get to immerse himself all day, everyday with other kids now they are free to play "full time" campo estivo in a carefree mode without having to face schooling before and after ?

Does he hell as like, cos I am going to have to get him up early to homeschool for half an hour before he goes to camp and then try and get him upright long enough to do the same when he comes home at six and do full time revision at the weekends.

Right that is it.

I am moving to sud Tirol. The Italian bit with autonomy.

Learning German is a lot less stressful than this.

I may have an overdeveloped sense of fair play, but I am going to get an ulcer if they keep this up.

I personally don't have any philosophical objections to my being (objectively) registered, tested and evaluated.

I have a massive objection to it being done on a seriously inclined playing field.

Anybody who says to me "this is Italy" is going to get clonked (be warned Sock Dropper), this wouldn't be Italy if there was a damn sight less apathy and shoulder shrugging. Italy is made of people, it isn't an entity in intself, with a crappy personality of its own that forces its ways onto an unsuspecting populace.

Pass me a pitchfork.

Cos I am taking this personally.

Particularly since the bulk of the other homeschoolers in Italy have either already done their exams or have date within or around the end of the school year.

I can't do this country anymore.

Basta.

Oh great, now I am leaking.

Exam skills of the sitting kind

2010-06-07T11:08:00.001+02:00

Son of Thor is out of practise at sitting still to think. We are doing exam practise and revision and right now he is rolling across the floor muttering to himself as he divides a decimal number by a double digit number.

We had chair aerobics during multiplication of the same. The making of "no snow" snow angels during place value, hedgehog imitations for fractions, try to bite own toes to accompany problems and sticking pens in orifices (facial, I hasten to add) during weights and measures. Geometry gymnastics pending.

He is getting the answers right more or less, with no help, although he keeps asking for reassurance that he is on the right track. So I think the material is OK, but we are going to have either practise sitting still and quiet for 2 hours at a time (apparently that is how long each exam can be) or I am going to have to buy superglue in bulk and surreptitiously stick him to the chair when he goes to be tested in July.

He is a fidget like me, that's how I think and process best, pootling or wibbling physically. I feel bad that the freedom I have given him over the year over his own body now has to be trained out of him.

Don't see what else I can do though, because the school will be deeply underwhelmed by break dancing in their testing process.

NB - It isn't that he can't sit still and be quiet when needed, as a life skill I have done an OK job as a parent in teaching him to suck it up in church, theatres etc etc. It's just an issue when he is thinking, he is out of practise at doing it in a stationary manner.

Online Italian lessons for Italian school kids

2010-06-04T17:53:00.000+02:00

Yes !!!

From Ciao Bambini, a pilot programme to explore tutor led on line learning for small native speakers of Italian. CLICK LINK FOR INFO

Superior parents home educate

2010-06-04T10:31:00.001+02:00

The rest send their kids to school.

Seriously. What a load of unmitigated bollocks.

"They (parents of kids in mainstream education) don't seem to like having their children around, whereas home educating parents enjoy the company of their children".

You can find variations of that sentiment all over the net, in many languages.

And I repeat, it is a load of unmitigated bollocks.

There is one single piece of information you can glean about a parent based on the fact they home educate.

And that is..... that they home educate.

There is as much variance in terms of parental affection, ability and "success" within the home educating sector of humanity as there is within the sector that uses schools.

I don't love Son of Thor more, or enjoy his company more now, than when he went to school.

And to be honest, I really sodding miss a chunk of the day to myself (potentially an offence punishable with excommunication).

Home education as a concept, as a practise, is good enough as it is.

Why would anybody need to pump it up by putting "the other side" down ?

We ought to have enough confidence in the validity of our choice not to feel the need to gild our Lilly.

The sensation of confidence and self assurance garnered via diminishing others is as substantial and as enduring as a mirage.

Not to mention being a pretty unpleasant thing to do in the first place.

Snowball

2010-06-03T10:38:00.002+02:00

Litter tray training: Buono
Snowball has made great progress in terms of understanding what the tray is for and where it is. The occurrences of peeing on his own feet have been greatly reduced. However there is still room for improvement, specifically in the areas of over enthusiastic digging, resulting in a kitchen sprayed with kitty litter and falling asleep in the litter tray as a direct result of over enthusiastic digging combined with the energy limitations of kittenhood.

Eating: Excellente
Snowball has worked hard on the sniffing out of food skills and his puffed up tummy is testimony to his perseverance and concentration. A minor criticism would be along the lines of perhaps combining this with self preservation skills and not sneaking between Sooty's legs to get at the food bowl, particularly at this squishable stage of his existence.

Sleeping: Insufficiente
Snowball needs to work on his inappropriate choice of sleeping arrangements. Kipping in the litter tray is a fail at KS1 (Kitty Standards 1). Waking up at 1am, 4am and 6 am respectively, while not appreciated, is however within the acceptable range for differentiated learning.

Playing: Discreto
After a slow start, with much withdrawal and shaking Snowball has made progress at a rate that is is exceptional. A little more attention paid to the sticking of baby claws in lower lips people who have no issue in reading the messages from their nerve endings and Snowball can reasonably expect to complete his coursework with flying colours.

Looking cute: Excellente (Lode, lode, lode)
But a bath wouldn't go amiss.

Another abandoned teeny tiny kitten

2010-06-02T11:14:00.003+02:00

That we found this morning.

But are not keeping.

No, seriously. I mean it this time.

Son of Thor is running through a list of names as we speak, but I will stand firm.

Ish.

UPDATE - Kitty is not an "feral cat has kittens in my garden and I want rid of them" dump, I left him alone in a kitty house with blanky for an hour and went up to check on him, he walked to my hand, purred, rolled over for a tummy tickle and then curled up in a ball in my hand to sleep. I really don't think a feral kitty would do that. I'm 99% sure he comes from domestic stock.

I am not under Bare Naked Mummy's control (see comments) Absolutly not...I...am...feeling...sleepy.....

UPDATE - His (?) name is Snowball, I wanted to call him Micro-Trouble, but have been outvoted 2-1.

How would you rate education in your country ?

2010-05-31T18:36:00.000+02:00

Are you surprised at how well (or not) your country performs compared to others ?

What do you think makes the difference ?

What would improve your county's standing ?

What issues stand in the way of your nation imporving in terms of educational attainment ?

Is there something in the water in Finland ?

International Education league table from PISA
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programme_for_International_Student_Assessment#League_Tables

I could learn to hate triangles

2010-05-31T16:44:00.000+02:00

Result of today's scintillating revision.

I could barely ~~keep my eyes open~~ contain my excitement.

I Triangoli on Prezi

Nurse Codface

2010-05-30T12:18:00.002+02:00

After a phone call from an ambulance at MILs house a couple of weeks ago she has had to be hospitalised for a while.

It is hard to trust a loved one to the tender loving care of a head nurse who insists that if the full time carer we provide can't there 24\7 they can't guarantee that she will be fed.

Despite being a diabetic.

All uttered with what would be a straight face, had the woman not distorted her visog with so much lip collagen that you have to accept the urge to give a fat lip is somewhat redundant.

History and geography collide

2010-05-29T12:01:00.001+02:00

when you make an interactive map of the ancient civilizations..especially if you are still getting the hang of the zoom tool.

In true obsessive style, we made another revision aid

Antiche Civiltà 1 on Prezi

Are books sprinkled with fairy dust ?

2010-05-28T09:04:00.002+02:00

"The disclosure follows the publication of a study that found keeping just 20 books in the home could boost children’s chances of doing well at school. "

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/educationnews/7763811/Children-more-likely-to-own-a-mobile-phone-than-a-book.html

(If you are bored by my yammering on incessantly about education issues - again - I have a guest post up on the lovely Really Rachel blog, where I swear I don't get all hot and bothered about teaching/schools/learning once)

Books don’t have magic properties.

Their presence does not cast a spell that ensures educational attainment or interest in learning.

The kids of the nouveux who buys them by the meter to fill his “library” will not garner a benefit just cos they are there.

The “magic” is in what the presence of books tends to represent. Parents who value educational attainment, learning, information, thinking, seeking knowledge and “risk taking” in terms of breadth of interests.

For the last few centuries books have been the primary mode of presentation of knowledge, further along the line in the digital age you are likely to be able to measure the same impact on a child’s education, thanks to parental attitude, via a diverse range of non-paper based information sources.

It’s not the books themselves, it is the reason why people have them, that makes the difference.

You can’t buy that. You have to be it.

There are a couple of TEDs that illustrate the tight box we put ourselves in when we attribute "magic properties" to a form of presentation. I don't buy into 100% of the message, 100% of the time for 100% of the kids , no matter how inspirational, but it does highlight how the mystic of books may well be holding educators back from engaging the children of the digital age.

Plus the speaker is really funny so well worth a watch.

The first video has subtitles in Italian for anybody interested.

Not spineless here.

2010-05-27T23:54:00.002+02:00

Just knackered after making this....cos we are both bored to tears with flashcards. Click the grey arrow at the bottom to move through the digital revision aid.

Vertebrati on Prezi

oh we are spineless ! Here is one that Son of thor made this morning.

Gli Invertebrati on Prezi

Revise your bum off

2010-05-26T10:07:00.001+02:00

Lucky us, our exam date will be in July.

All the schooled kids get tested at the end of the academic year. All of us who have to take the parità exams (some private schools have to have the pupils tested externally) take the exams a month after school is out for the summer.

To avoid everything we have learned falling out of his head without taking away his summer fun at centro estivo I'm making flashcards so we can have daily reviews that keep things fresh without taking up loads of time.

I like this one if it is of any use for anybody else.

http://www.proprofs.com/flashcards/

Here is an example.

Invertebrati- classe » ProProfs flashcard maker

and here is another one cos I am showing off now ( :

Vertebrati - Classe » ProProfs flashcards

Computer says "No spik inglish"

2010-05-26T08:47:00.000+02:00

500 euros later, new computer, complete with Italian keyboard and Italian OS.

Mega sulk in progress.

But she is pretty.

Even if she "talks" funny.

On the sick computer, after a solid 24 hours of painstakingly reinstalling Vista every couple of hours (with much bad lanaguage) in order to (incredibly slowly) save to a flash key all my stuff, I think I managed to get all the files I really didn't want to lose.

Never again.

From now on I am uploading to a remote hard drive even if I have to pay for it.

Internet withdrawal and sick hard drive angst, what a combo for a woman currently full to the brim of raging hormones.

Computer Death

2010-05-23T14:02:00.001+02:00

Leaves one mourning for lost files, photos and songs.

All suggestions for online storage facilities to avoid future data wakes accepted with gratitude.

Excuse me while I go weep into a soggy tissue.

I am now a very famous person, please form an orderly queue for autographs

2010-05-12T19:18:00.000+02:00

Bursting with self importance here.

Yes, I, Blogger of the Year (Home Educating and Pilgrim Infested in Italy category) have been interviewed by Italy Magazine...where I managed to demonstrate just how suitable I am to be solely responsible for my son's education ..... by failing to proofread my answers.

Ahh well

Fame, fame at last !!

http://www.italymag.co.uk/italy-featured/milano/blog-week-home-educate-italy

This RAF baby is grounded.

2010-05-11T12:27:00.001+02:00

I had no doubt that industry pressure was brought hard to bear in terms of deciding the safe limits within which commercial aircraft could fly while a volcano had an extended belch. And not to a point that was inside my comfort zone.

Read this and went into mega wibble.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2010/may/11/ryanair-emergency-landing-ash-fears

I grew up on RAF bases, my father was a fighter pilot, one who survived ejection when a German helicopter got in the way, but I've never been that happy about being up in the air in a tin can. I guess bird envy is not genetic.

I don't think it helped that my virgin flight was in my early 20s, direct to Bangkok, to meet the (slightly royal) family that my husband had neglected to inform about our marriage. 16 hours of worrying that I was either going to die as we hit the earth hard, die from being confined for 16 hours solid, or die when his family went ballistic and had me sent to the Tower or something to await execution.

After some thought about how to get home and back as well as manage my newly increased loathing of flying I'm plumping for letting the train take the strain.

You can get to London from Milan with one change in Paris. It's not as cheap as flying, it's not as fast as flying, it's probably not as safe (allegedly) as flying, but it doesn't involved a nose dive from on high if it all goes horribly wrong.

I reckon we can also take advantage of a stop over for one night, so I can show Son of Thor Paris.

The big issues for me now are...

How to keep the DSi charged for an extended period to avoid parental hurling of small child out of train window by hour nine.

Learn a bit of French so some mad taxi driver doesn't end up driving us off to the wrong place during the station transfer.

Manage the panic attack when in the chunnel, imagining some terrorist bomb that thrusts me into a personal version of the Poseidon Adventure, which I really don't think my parents should have let me watch at such an impressionable age.

Build resistance to being internet free for 12 hours without coming out in a rash or going into twitchy, dribbling withdrawal.

Other than that, I feel it is time to bid farewell to SleasyJet, that passport controlling freak of a git at Linate (who always tries to stop me leaving the country with Son of Thor cos he is convinced I am kidnapping the kid from his father) and suitcase angst as I endless weigh my bags hoping that some miraculous diet has taken place which means I can take home all the stuff I have bought without paying through the nose for it.

I am already planning the purchase of some seriously heavy items that have been off limits for the last 15 years.

Tesco's, here I come baby.

Brace yourself darling.

Hanging on to your seat ?

2010-05-06T21:54:00.002+02:00

To see if parliament is hung, or the Tories are back in again (by skin of teeth) ?
First time in my life where I haven't actually known who I want to win.

Just as well I don't live there anymore or I'd be holding up the queue dithering over my ballot.

One big disadvantage of home education, cannot indulge self in staying up all night to count the Portillo moments, cos have to be up at the normal time to teach.

In an awake and not going "Uhgg, wot ? coffee !" way

It don't rain unless it pours...

2010-05-05T17:14:00.001+02:00

33mm of rain in ..a matter of hours. On top of about 15mm yesterday.

Back garden submergible pump evidently blocked, given the river of water pouring like an ambitious creek from the back garden to the front garden...via the kitchen. Luckily I had moved the Dyson earlier or it would have floated out of the door

Put off any attempt to hoik out pump and unblock cos am holding a screaming child and husband gets off the phone to the pediatrician saying "we have to take him to hospital now, she thinks it's appendicitis"

Turns out it is Papa's fault for buying him chips from the kebab shop. Evidently not hygene freaks there, very nasty tummy upset not appendicitis, he is now fast asleep and a colour approaching just pale rather than grey.

The second he dropped off I waded through the kitchen to the back and managed to get large clump of what looks like a T-shirt that managed to fall down the well (Sock Dropper, famed for leaving clothes lying around, chief suspect) out of the sucky end of back garden pump.

Sweeping water out of the house when not on mini break involving internet based whinge about having a really bad day.

So let's see

Goldie died.
Whiskers got stuck up a tree involving late night dramatic rescue.
House flooded with child looking close to death.

That's three right ?

Not that I'm superstitious or anything.

Touch wood
And left tit
Just in case fate is Italian.

And you wonder why students cheat in Italy ?

2010-05-04T18:23:00.001+02:00

Taken from a primary school teachers' forum, just one example of many that either directly or covertly indicated that in the upcoming INVALSI exams (think SATS), where no external invigilation impeded it, they would be "helping" their students pass the exam.

"Trying in the meantime to respect the rules, but many of our colleagues refuse to even consider it, when the day comes they'll give (dictate ?) the answers. And frankly, I'm beginning to think they might have the right idea."

(cercando nel contempo di rispettare tutte le regole, ma molte nostre colleghe non ci pensano nemmeno, quando verrà il giorno detteranno le risposte e francamente si comincia a fare strada in me l'idea che forse loro fanno bene.)

Kind of unfair to expect the kids to chose to do the right thing if at school somebody is actively INSTRUCTING them to cheat.

Especially if that person is their own teacher.

EDITED TO ADD...apparently if you have doubts about teachers, inserted hidden webcams seem to be not only allowed, but really rather effective.

http://www.corriere.it/cronache/10_aprile_29/catania-schiaffi-ai-bimbi-maestra-arrestata_6546d924-536d-11df-afe0-00144f02aabe.shtml

May Day ? Mayday !

2010-05-02T10:50:00.000+02:00

Whiskers, Son of Thor's kitten that we found dumped in the woods some months ago, that we defiantly weren't keeping, is now sterilized and slightly less silly. So we have spent the last few weeks introducing him to the great outdoors.

He has been pretty good about staying in the garden, only fell over the wall into next door's garden once. Thankfully just their big dog was out at the time and limited himself to barking furiously. I had to cut down two bay trees to avoid a reoccurrence cos he was up on the wall again five minutes after rescue.

Yesterday evening however, he decided it was unfair that he was the only cat with a curfew and shot out the door when the Sock Dropper finally gave in to my demands that he take the rubbish out.

Four hours later I was wandering up and down the track calling him and banging on a tin of cat food in utter panic, thinking that two animal funerals in the same number of days was more than I could bear and well beyond Son of Thor's misery tolerance.

I found four of my other cats all sitting under the big oak. Looking up with a distinct expression on their collective female faces that said "Well he does still have a penis, so what do you expect ?"

A quick survey of the situation ended with me three meters up ladder, precariously balanced on a rather floppy hedge.

The Sock Dropper was allegedly holding the ladder, but kept letting go to chain smoke (from the stress, cos being on terra firma is soooooooooo much more stressful that being in mid air with a spiky hedge underneath you).

Son of Thor aided operations by running around making loud suggestions about what kind of damage I would sustain if I fell and imploring me to make sure that if I did, it was Whiskers side up.

Half an hour of heart stopping grab attempts later I descended with many puncture wounds and a growly kitten, who only discovered he is afraid of heights after he shot up a huge tree and discovered that he couldn't do the trip in reverse.

Whiskers is grounded. Under house arrest. Inside from 5pm onward come hell or high water.

Cos I can live with rescue attempts.

But not in the dark.

Still, Son of Thor has become really interested in gravity.

Especially the splat factor.

He is mulling over how high I would have had to be for each of the hypothetical gory outcomes he has hypothesized for me.

This is not what I had in mind when I bought into the "The World is Our Classroom !!" deal.

I was thinking more along the lines of happy, clappy slightly smuggy-knickers posts.

I want my money back.

Our First Official (Not a) School Trip........Oh god.

2010-04-30T23:15:00.001+02:00

We went to the Leonardo DV Science Museum in Milan as our first official not-school trip.

Too much in there for one day, we'll have to go back for a second round.

Here is a glimpse into an imperfect home educator's experience of "The World is My Classroom"

Do not get period night before big, huge, hyped trip.

Especially if have run out of tampax and reduced to wearing big, huge massive cowboy-walk-inducing mega pads until can find pharmacy in Milan several long and chaffed hours after trip begins.

Do not glower at school trip kids in museum wishing that you too could be enjoying their parents' version of said trip, i.e. peacefully at work or even better, propped up in front of TV with a cup of tea, rather than solely responsible for a small boy that resembles one of those balls bouncing everywhere in a pinball machine, who keeps asking "why are you walking funny ?" in loud voice.

Do try to attach own child to passing groups of school kids, to have breather from the constant yak/interrogation of precise working of turbines directed only at oneself.

Do hope teachers don't notice leech like quality of cowboy-esque gaited hanger on + overexcited small boy.

Do not underestimate power of real submarine to induce seismic outrage in Son of Thor when he discovers they have sold out of the entry tickets to get inside it.

Don't go in the shop unless you wish to exit over laden with things like kits to make a potato clock and such like. Which appear to be 15 sodding Euros for a couple of bits of wire, a few strips of metal and the cheapest LED clock in the universe. And a very big box.

Don't believe the first info point at Centrale Station when he tells you you should have been at another station, half a city away, 15 minutes ago, if you had really wanted to get home tonight.

Don't listen to the second info point when they send you (3/4 of a crowded kilometer away) to platform one instead of platform 23 and leave you running back to where you started in the first place, sweating like a pig, weighed down by potato clocks etc, only to find the stupid ticket validation machine won't work and Mr. JobsWorth wants to make you miss the train you have finally located, by hand validating your tickets as slowly as only a statale worker overdosed on valium can.

Do give up hope of exploiting (heavily edited) account of day's events to use for a mini newspaper project, when discover that Goldie the guinea pig, who was hiding in the belly on Kimmie the guinea pig when we bought her, has inexplicably died.

Do add tissues to TAMPAX !!!!! to the shopping list, when you are forced to resort to using the last of the toilet paper to both dry your overtired and heartbroken little boy's tears and mummify a guinea pig in readiness for tomorrow's funeral.

I read hundreds of home educators posts about their educational trips whilst I was considering making the jump to HE.

I had certain expectations as a result.

Reorganizing the contents of the freezer to make space for a corpse wasn't one of them.

Insert dark muttering along the lines of Trades Descriptions Act.

Caticide and the Pilgrims

2010-04-28T09:16:00.000+02:00

Two events occurred post canale 5 putting Ivo's ugly mug on the box.

First somebody or some entity had him charged with .. see this is the problem about waking up hours before the Sock Dropper.. I can't remember the name of the law. Something about not exploiting the credulity of the population, for money or otherwise. It is the same law that had Vanna Marchi (evil woman who used tarot cards on telly and menaced old people with threats to put the evil eye on them if they didn't hand over their life savings) put away two years ago.

Oh here it is, found it !

Il Codice Penale italiano prevede, all'articolo 661, il reato di "abuso della credulità popolare".

Excellent news, I tried to make the same denuncia a year ago but got fobbed off, it will be far harder for the mayor to play his pro-Ivo game with this banner and all its " Vanna Marchi" implications now clearly hung over the magic water industry.

An environmental group made a second formal complaint, and it seems he has also been charged on this count too. You may want to sit down and stop eating before you read this.

The SOB placed illegal traps to catch nutria

(here is a nutria, they are half rat, half otter I think, the magic water site is infested with them.)

and instead managed to trap and kill several domestic cats.

So now my next door neighbour knows why her pet cats dropped from 9 to 3 in the space of a couple of months.

These are no humane traps, they are outlawed for a reason, we are talking about a protracted and agonizing death.

My moggies are all accounted for,probably cos since the pilgrims arrived I instigated a little and often feeding programme to keep them mainly in our garden, I was so scared of them going under the sudden influx of cars.

Which is lucky for Ivo, cos if I had lost a cat and then read that newspaper report he would have needed to get his running shoes on and go like the clappers.

I always try to keep the pilgrim posts light and funny-ish, cos it is my way of getting it out of my system in a way that lifts me up rather than squashes me down. But I can't find even a the merest giggle today.

The bastard needlessly, without a second thought tortured and killed a domestic animal, knew it belonged to one of us, kept quiet and then carried on to do it again and again and again.

Now I understand why he had no compunction about selling dirty, pesticide tainted water to the mothers of preemies or kids undergoing chemo.

The man is conscience free zone.

Dear So and So - "more pilgrims" edition.

2010-04-23T12:18:00.004+02:00

Background for the understandably confused.
Because let's face it, pilgrim invasion is not your typical expat issue.

Dear Canale 5

Please don't put Ivo on the telly again this week. You only end up encouraging more mad pilgrims to descend on me.

Dear Parco Ticino Police

Let me get this straight. I need to wait four months while you think about letting me build some walls around the garden to protect us from the worst of the pilgrim invasion. And then you'll say no for environmental reasons (despite all my neighbours having walls). Whereas Ivo has illegally built a hut, dug wells, scattered asbestos panels and other assorted rubbish around the place and done everything possible to turn an EU Oasis of nature into an autostrada of 1000s of pilgrims that have chased all the wildlife away...and there is nothing you can do.

Fuck you and your bent priorities.

Dear Ivo

Having observed you drunkenly drive your tractor damn near into a ditch you can now expect me to call the police, both where I live and where you do, with your license plate, asking them to breathalyse you reguarly and often. With any luck you'll get so many points that you'll have to stay at home and the pilgrim invasion will grind to a halt.

Dear Priest

Lets get this straight, you expect ME to go down and steal the Madonna that Ivo is prostituting. I have no moral qualms about it, but you do realize it weighs a tonne and a half and I am not exactly a candidate for the world's strongest man. How do you feel about me taking a sledgehammer to it instead ?

Dear Pilgrims

There is no evidence to support the healing claims of the magic water.

Bar one.

If you stick your head under it for ten minutes straight it has a most effective salutary effect on stupidity.

Granddad, I love you.

2010-04-17T23:01:00.001+02:00

The hospital don't know which way things will go and I can't be there.

You always sang "Sole Mio" to us during those long and and giggle filled summer holidays in Sheffield and told us stories of your war time experience here in Italy.

I think you loved this place more than I do.

That's why it felt only fitting to have Son of Thor carry your name.

In my heart, in my little boy's lopsided grin, you will always be here under that Italian sun.

Feel the warmth.

No. New. Shoes.

2010-04-16T15:50:00.000+02:00

Not even a sniff of them.

Cos I went to the opticians.

I now have a 450 Euro hole in my fantasy budget.

The Sock Dropper is resolutely refusing to come on board to my rationale that since the optician says I should have had these glasses for the last two decades or so, they are actually only costing 22.50 !

Cos my fantasy budget is annual and this is one pair of needed glasses whose cost should retrospectively be spread out over the last twenty years of fantasy budget, which if you think about it leaves plenty left over (from the previous 450 Euros worth of glasses that I DIDN'T buy, cos I wasn't aware I was supposed to see that far away) for "powder blue criss cross T strap with a twist" stilettos.

He is sticking his heels in and going with a more literally interpretation of numbers along the lines of - 450 out now, means no more going out for purposes of giving Imelda Marcos a run for her money.

I am forlorn.

I'd much rather spend all those Euros on shoes.
Who needs to see anyway.

It's only the far away stuff.

Like the telly.

I can see my own feet just fine.

Cutting the baby out of the boy.

2010-04-14T19:55:00.003+02:00

We went to the hairdressers. His first professional cut.

Washed. Styled. Blow Dried.

Gelled even.

I took a little boy in and came out with a tweeny.

He looks a bit like a tousled, super-cool hedgehog, is ecstatic and can't take his eyes off any reflection in a ten meter radius.

In lieu of an available reflection he will twist and turn to get a better look at his spiky fringe in his shadow.

We even had our first "bad hair" crisis after martial arts that involved me having to re-gel the fringe to his liking. In the car park.

It was really odd, as the scissors snipped the little boy vanished and this young man-to-be emerged. I felt both excited for him, yet sad, all at the same time.

Where do the years go?

Cos I swear it was only two minutes ago that I was having to bribe him with five euro notes (recycled, don't call the mumy police, it's not like I let him spend them) to do a poo in the loo rather than in his beloved nappy.

I'm going to blink and he is going to be looking down at the top of my head.

Which means I need new shoes, even higher ones.

See ! Silver lining in every tweenage cloud.

Those power blue, suede, criss cross "T-strap with a twist" stilettos that I spied today (and made a bee line for, practically licking the shop window in my heel-lust) .... are mine !

89 euros for shoes only looks extortionate until you compare it to the cost of pre-empty-nest-angst therapy.

If you think about it, I'm being really rather frugal all things considered.

I vant to be alone...............

2010-04-11T09:40:00.003+02:00

Not.

And I am not.

I went to facebook briefly to ask husband 1.0 if he had managed to stay alive in the latest unrest in BKK. He is old now and less likely to decide to go and move his car during a sodding machine gun decorated riot like last time. Or take his shopping deprived wife to a mega mall (we had to stay indoors for about three days, that is my personal limit on not shopping) and drive up the wrong road, straight into a convey of tanks chasing renegades on motorbike, all coming full tilt straight at us. I'm certain that this time he just stayed in doors and was very sensible, but I thought I'd check.

So while there I noticed a personal message, which once again FB failed to inform me of by email, like wot I asked them to do.

Tis another home educator in the regione di Pavia !!!!!

Dances in swirly manner around the room.

Gets dizzy.

Falls over.

Am I officially a home educating group now ?

Did you birth a bookworm ?

2010-04-08T20:32:00.000+02:00

If not and you occasionally have collywibbles over the lack of enthusiasm for reading that your smallie displays a fellow blogger has a lovely article published in "Mumsense magazine"with do-able suggestion as to how you can tempt them to interact with books more. Click through the pages to "reading matters" on page 38 and zoom in.
And as an added extra on the front cover is the style Son of Thor has chosen for his very first professional haircut.

Is it a bit too styled for a nine year old ?

Cos I think it looks like it will need blow-drying and mousse.

If you couldn't be bothered to blow-dry and mousse it, due to the amount of garden that will be in it by the end of the day making it all a bit too much faff considering, would it still look nice in a flatter version ?

Who's afraid of the big, intimidating blogger.. ?

2010-04-07T09:22:00.001+02:00

I'm not.

Famed scaredycat who is intimidated by your successful, well read sort of blog peeps, has had a revelation.

I saw an offer to host guest posts on a "big" blog I read regularly.

My first reaction was to quiver and think "nooooo, set myself up for rejection, not on your bleeding nelly."

But then from nowhere the goddess of the lily livered kicked me up the bum, took over the keyboard and volunteered me while I whimpered in the corner going "wot you do that for ?"

The Big Intimidating Blogger turned out to be ....incredibly lovely, friendly, helpful and encouraging.

Like, as in ...lots and lots.

And then I wrote my guest post.

And she was STILL incredibly lovely, friendly, helpful and encouraging.

Which I think was probably the most important gain of this exercise.

Doing something new doesn't automatically equate with poking your head in a lion's cage and waiting for it to get bitten off.

Many thanks to Mid Atlantic English, fellow expat and all round good egg, for not just the opportunity to move outside of my comfort zone, but for holding my hand along the way. Well above the call of duty.
If they introduce a category along the lines of encouraging new bloggers in all the bloggy awards, she'd win.

If anybody else fancies doing a guest post, but has the collywibbles, I think the above blog is a great place to start.

Here is my guest post on her blog entitled

Cultural Shocker of the Parental Kind

My shameful secret....

2010-04-06T11:11:00.001+02:00

Despite being a teacher of 21 years standing.
Despite being a home educator.

I am uneducated.

I left school at 16.

On the second morning of my 'O' levels my father packed a bag, arranged to empty the joint bank account and left us for a "woman" not that much older than myself.

Out of an expected 13 'O' levels (although there was a question mark over maths and physics) I got 4.

2 of those were RE and Home Economics.

With the money gone, grieving in full throttle I abandoned education completely.

There had never been any question over my future, I was to go to university and become a professional. It was a litany of "Be a good girl, work hard, obey the rules, do well, make us proud", however that is a shaky foundation to build a child's educational aspirations on if you quite patently exclude yourself from the same expectations by throwing your family under a bus.

I got very "sauce for the goose" about it, at the time it hurt him more than myself to become a drop out and get a crappy, dead end job instead. So I did.

And then I fell into teaching.

I had to work twice as hard, be three times as good as your average graduate to get the better positions in my field since most of them state the need for a degree before they even begin chuntering about professional qualifications and experience. However that wasn't the most damaging aspect of being a degree free zone.

I started to think of myself as stupid.

Probably due to a growing sense of shame, because wherever possible I kept my lack of education a secret. I learned to dodge questions about "which university did you go to ?" with tap dancing alacrity, terrified I would be trapped in a corner by somebody persistent, ashamed that I needed to be doing linguistic gymnastics of avoidance in the first place.

As a result the sensation that I was thick grew to the point where I shut down any possibility of returning to education, because I felt that I was not intelligent enough to succeed.

Then I started home educating and whilst researching it I read that maternal educational attainment is the best indicator as to how far a child will take their education.

Talk about an immediate impact.

I can hurt me, make my life harder in some wierd power struggle with a father I don't have, but I won't play silly buggers with my son's future. I don't want the struggles I had for him.

Looking into the OU started out as an exercise in being a better parent, but dabbling in Open Learning (which I thoroughly recommend if you are uneasy about returning to higher education or have a particular interest you wish to take further, costs nothing but time) awoke interests and suddenly my own own internal motivations, as a separate human being from my family, bloomed.

Here is my open degree, it isn't finalized, there are some ifs, buts and maybes and some courses I can't chose between at the moment, but I am going to do this and finally lay to rest the residual anger at having a parent who put himself first whilst pretending he was doing it for the benefit of his children cos "they can't be happy if I'm not".

26 years is too long to cut off your nose to spite your face, especially since the person you are trying to get at stopped giving a crap more than 2 and half decades ago.

I have a 20 credit transfer from other study so just 340 to go LOL

Level 1 100 credits

http://www3.open.ac.uk/study/undergraduate/course/l195.htm Andante:30

(no page yet) Vivace, intermediate Italian 30

start writing essays http://www3.open.ac.uk/study/undergraduate/course/a172.htm 10

start writing fiction http://www3.open.ac.uk/study/undergraduate/course/a174.htm 10

design and the web http://www3.open.ac.uk/study/undergraduate/course/t183.htm 10

beyond google http://www3.open.ac.uk/study/undergraduate/course/tu120.htm 10
or
I may replace the last three on the list above with classical Greek or classical Latin, depends on how the taster courses on Open Learning go

Level 2 120 credits

U211 - http://www3.open.ac.uk/study/undergraduate/course/u211.htm 60 Exploring the English language

A215 http://www3.open.ac.uk/study/undergraduate/course/a215.htm 60 creative writing (this may get booted for Greek or Latin)

Level 3 120 credits

E303- http://www3.open.ac.uk/study/undergraduate/course/e303.htm60 English grammar in context (conf)

E363 - http://www3.open.ac.uk/study/undergraduate/course/a363.htm 60 adv. creative writing, (this may get booted for Greek and Roman Myths.)

It might take a few years to get there, but considering the 26 that preceded it, better late than never. Especially if heals up the residual scars of an adolescence that went sour. Because aside from my obvious motivation to do the best parenting job I can for my boy, in some odd way I am also retrospectively parenting the ghost of the kid I was.

I know that doesn't make a lot of sense, I am a bit taken aback to hear myself say it.

This was supposed to be a celebratory post of of, "hey look what web 2.0 can do and education is even more accessible now we have technology", but underneath I keep coming back to a 16 year old who felt abandoned by the people who were supposed to do their best by her.

On a maternal level I need to put that right.

Maybe I should study psychology as a form of self-help, cos the above is giving me the collywibbles about my own mental state.

Needing to parent the child you used to be ?

That's odd.

Still, at least I'll be a graduate weirdo rather than a "be4'o'leveled" weirdo.

Get your candyfloss....

2010-04-02T09:22:00.001+02:00

And have a munch whilst enjoying the wordy rides at the "bringing up bilingual kids carnival"

http://multitonguekids.blogspot.com/2010/04/easter-kind-of-carnival.html

I like the host's site loads. She is my mirror image (if you don't count the fact she is doing loads of languages cheerfully while I flop around bewailing just two) cos she is an Italian mummy abroad, so I find her perspective fascinating.

Enjoy yourselves whilst I bang my head against a brick wall trying to get Son of Thor to allow his kitten a little outside freedom without grabbing him every ten seconds and running back inside with him.

I'm videoing it. So when he is a teenager and wanting to go out at all hours I can play it back to him as a response to his "but WHY can't I go and be a dirty stop out ?".

You never know.

He might remember how he felt about letting Whiskers spread his wings and take pity on me by at least coming home, soberish, when I tell him to.

Well.

That's the plan.

Plan B is to put him in the freezer a few days a week to delay growth and keep him small so I don't have to face it for a few more decades. At least not till dementia sets in and I can't remember what I am supposed to be worried about.

How do mother's of teenagers cope with the letting go when their kids are high on enthusiasm and low on common sense ?

If I hadn't been such a bloody awful running off and getting married teenager maybe I wouldn't be in such a state about the future.

This is nemesis isn't it ?

Seedy Kids

2010-03-31T12:03:00.001+02:00

If you like the idea of gardening with your kids, but can't think of any ideas that don't risk you ending up with carrots sprouting all over your garden as your enthusiastic child hurls whole packets of seeds all over the lawn, try this site, http://www.carrotsandkids.com/

I am bookmarking posts all over the shop cos I'd like this to be a year round thing and many of the ideas are not "growing season" specific.

Pilgrim Identification Process

2010-03-30T10:54:00.000+02:00

Brief(ish) backstory - here

1. Do allow 17th, so far today, lurking person at the gate the chance to speak before you launch into anti-magic water diatribe.

2. Don't stomp forward with jutting chin, spade in hand looking menacing. It scares people into silence so they can't perform number 1.

3. Do listen to what they are saying rather than imagining that they are burbling "Magic holy healing water where is ? MARIA !!!!!! HALLI-flobbing-LUYAHH!"

4. Don't talk over them yelling that they are personally responsible for the prostitution of The Madonna, cos you won't hear them mention the desire to speak to the Sock Dropper about buying his car.

5. Do use spade clenched in hand to dig hole, climb in and refilled with self underneath mound of earth when non-pilgrim status is finally established, despite your best efforts to the contrary, as they flatten themselves against the fence to sidle past you to look over said car in cursory and nervous manner before shooting out at warp speed nine to "think about it".

6. Don't try and convince Sock Dropper it's not actually your fault that potential car buyers are fleeing the scene in way normally associated with Vesuvius puking wildly. It makes him even crosser.

Although I have to say I blame car buyers myself, for not coming down with a big "I want to buy your heap of an Opal Astra" sticker stuck on their bumper.

Perfectly reasonable expectation given that Spring has sprung, Easter is around the corner, kids are on hols and b....asketcase pilgrims have gone from a trickle to a constant stream in a single weekend, which has unleashed something along the lines of homicidal rage in my normally smiley self.

Oh yeah.

They're BAAAAAAAAA---AAACKKKKKK !

Shoot me now.

Eleventy !!

2010-03-29T12:38:00.001+02:00

Son of Thor left school with an average of 6 for maths (but got a 7 on his report, which I find confusing). 6 is a scrape pass.

He regarded the subject as a Machiavellian form of boy torture and his maths confidence was on the same scale as a slug's salt confidence.

All change !!!!

His maths programme shows progress in terms of "age", and he just turned eleven ( :

He is only 9 and a half(ish) in RL.

To him that means he is now "big". And good at maths. Not stupid !!!! Quite clever actually.

To me it means the world to see him insist on maths as the first lesson of the day and see himself as a "can do" rather than a "can't do, so won't try, am stupid".

It's not the maths so much, although I do want him to do well in such an essential subject.

It's the sheer relief of getting my kid back, the self-confident one with a positive attitude towards new (and sometimes difficult to get the hang of) stuff and a healthy, realistic dose of self esteem.

I might be a particularly soppy form of mummyhood, but I'll admit the old days of him slapping himself on the forehead saying "stupid, Stupid, STUPID" gave me a few nights with covert tears, using the Sock Dropper's snoring to cover up the sound of my sniffles.

I'm a bit leaky now, but that's just maternal pleasure at seeing him celebrating his achievement .......... and a huge dose of sheer relief.

1,300 Euros for a shower ?

2010-03-27T19:20:00.000+01:00

That's BEFORE IVA.

Love a duck I nearly choked.

My one (and last) dip into the world of slightly posher than bog standard plumber supply shops, has left me gasping that there are so many people in the world that can redo a bathroom, including all new plumbing and still have enough left over for a "magazine style" shower.

It wasn't even a whizz bangy massage you with jets of water shower.

I played it cool till she wrote out my quote and then ran out of the shop before the Sock Dropper finished his fag, overheard the salesperson, had an instant heart attack and then moved the contents of our joint account to Brazil as a form of defensive finances.

I just managed to get to the normal plumber shop in time to pick up a ceramic shower base and a non-exciting tap before he shut, with the doors on order the whole thing will come to about 400 tops. By the time I pick up the loo, the bidet, the basin and all the taps (why are taps so expensive ?) we'll have done the whole caboodle for significantly less than the quote for just the spiffy shower.

Cancel my subscription to Brava Casa, I'm just not in that league. And now I know why they never print the prices on the stuff they feature.

Long live Brico and bog standard builder supply shops.

We the proletariat will be clean too !

Just not soaping up in the same kind of style.

Child stripped in class (again), and this time beaten too.

2010-03-26T19:19:00.004+01:00

.
.
Ta to La scuola die genitori for giving me the heads up.

Teacher fired (forced to resign)?

Not shuffled ?

/THUD/

I've whacked it through an automatic translation, but in brief, a kid aged six threw a wobbly, the teacher decided the best punishment was to have him strip naked in the middle of the room and be beaten by his classmates.

What is it with this stripping off business ?

Good on the director for having a big pair of brass balls and not rolling over in the face of union pressure.

The link to the original is here, I've tried to tidy up the translation a bit but it is a mess, still you can get the gist.

Translation

to tell the story of the boy's friends were humiliated

"Stripped and beaten in class'

Investigated a teacher in Ferrara

It 'happened in a kindergarten school. The teacher resigned, the Prosecutor opened an investigation

to tell the story of the boy's friends were humiliated

"Stripped and beaten in class'

Investigated a teacher in Ferrara

It 'happened in an asylum(kindergarten). The teacher resigned, the Prosecutor opened an investigation

MILAN - Nude in the middle class, beaten by his companions. This was the punishment given out by the teacher to a child of six years in an asylum (well if he is six it is primary school not kindergarten) of Ferrara, when he was throwing a tantrum. To bring the story is the site Quotidiano.net, whereby the little victim was transferred to another preschool while the teacher accused resigned.

The story - "We are shocked," say the parents. "I could not believe - they explain - how this could have happened and now we want the truth." It 'was the manager of the club planning to tell their parents what had happened. "He apologized to us - explain - was mortified, said he had already spoken to that teacher, who had been discharged, and had already taken measures to initiate proceedings against him. To tell what was happening in the classroom for the first time would have been the best friend of the boy and his mother then, having confided to other parents and getting confirmation, would be submitted by the manager. "Now our son - take over their parents - will not even talk to that child because maybe he, too, was among those forced to hit him at the command of the teacher." The juvenile prosecutor opened an investigation, the teacher was suspected of abuse to children.

Siti of the useful kind

2010-03-26T16:11:00.007+01:00

Subject - Italian

Suposed to be middle school level, but there is stuff in there that Son of Thor will find useful.

http://www.pianetascuola.it/risorse/media/secondaria_secondo/italiano/sensini_online/home.html

Learning Italian with a farting frog. Yes, you did just read that right.

http://www.loescher.it/librionline/risorse_apritisesamo/download/interattivo/start.html

To help with the dreaded grammar analysis. (at the very least you should try so you can feel your child's pain, LOL)

http://digilander.libero.it/sussidi.didattici/grammaticale/partidiscorso.html

More grammar analysis, but with butterflies and swans, which takes the edge of it ...a bit.

http://digilander.libero.it/sussidi.didattici/grammaticale/farfalle.html

A grammar book, where the explanations are in cartoon form.

http://www.ufottoleprotto.com/grammatica.htm

A grammar poster, what bedroom would be without one ? Actually it's not bad for homework help.

http://www.marikarongo.fan-club.it/download/mappa_grammatica_giusi_2.pdf

A zillion grammar worksheets at elementary level to ~~torture~~ help your children.

http://www.mammaebambini.it/category/esercizi-scuola-primaria/italiano/

Worksheets, multimedia lessons. Not just grammar, this one offers reading comp too.

http://maestralidia.netsons.org/archivio.html

Aimed at media/high school kids, but the concept maps would be useful for little ones who are going cross eyed when their teacher bangs on about concrete v abstract nouns.

http://www.alphacentauri.it/testi/materiali_did/mat_italiano.htm

Introduces kids to the different kinds of texts they will be expected to recognise at ele/media.

http://www.jesicentro.it/PERCDIDA/AREE/italiano.htm

Past, present or future, blowing up planets game. But it is HARD !! Well it was for me.

http://digilander.libero.it/sussidi.didattici/grammaticale/imploverbi.html

A bloodthirsty woodland habitat and food chain based grammar game. Does not distract you from how hard it is. Guessing this is for late media and upwards.

http://digilander.libero.it/sussidi.didattici/grammaticale/libellule.html

Verbs and tenses, simple interactive tests.

http://splashscuola.altervista.org/esercizi/verbi/verbi-indice.shtml

http://webs.racocatala.cat/llengua/it/index.htm

If you know the infinitive, but can't conjugate it there is a generator here that will do it for you. Great for when you are stuck with homework.

http://www.scuolaelettrica.it/quiz/media/classe2/italiano/coniugatore.shtml

Excercises for 4th and 5th year elementary students. Boring, but useful.

http://www.ddrivoli1.it/portolingua/giochi_di_lingua.htm#grandi

Printable worksheets, good stuff for verbs.

http://www.mammaebambini.it/esercizi-scuola-primaria/italiano/schede-didattiche-per-bambini-scuola-primaria/

Happy clicking.

Everything you never wanted to know

2010-03-26T13:02:00.001+01:00

about me.

Yes I have discovered "pages", and I wrote one. But I am buggered if I am not going to get a post out of it as well cos it took ages to spell check.

So, behold. The Sarah. Warts...and more warts.

____________________________________

I'm British.

I'm 42.

Since I left the UK at 21 that means I have spent half my life and the bulk of my adult life outside of the UK.

I didn't do it on purpose. I have as much desire to see the world as a slug does. I just have a habit of marrying "forrin" men

My first marriage was to a member of the Thai royal family.

I do pick 'em.

I got a (lowly) title, a home in the grounds of a massive, falling down estate in the middle of Bangkok and a rampant case of clinical depression.

Not helped by Black May taking place right outside my gate.

I got shot at by my father in law.

He missed. He did go to prison at the weekends (royal remember) for a few months after the event, although not for the pot shots, the charge was for not having turned in a war weapon.

There was a spate of coup d'état, not fun when you are tank phobic.

And my husband didn't love me.

Well not in a way you would normally recognize as love anyway.

I don't remember when I left, I have huge gaps thanks to a combo of alcohol and unhappiness, but I did leave in the end. Just as well for both our sakes. I was a walking advert for why it might not be your best choice to move in with your first love at 16 and marry him at 18 when you are still reeling from your parents getting divorced.

Then I stuck a pin in a map and came to Italy. By bus. There was no Sleasyjet in those days.

Cleverly I decided to come to Milan to flash my super TEFL CV at schools....on the 3rd of August. Doing my homework and looking before I leap, not my greatest strength.

Shagged half of Milan in an effort to stop the pain.

Dragged the Sock Dropper home one evening in early December. Scared the crap out of him by being sexually aggressive. He wouldn't give up despite me pushing him away emotionally. He kept coming back and insisting we left the bedroom and go out and talk (well sign language and point at word in a dictionary)and stuff.

The git.

Have you any idea how much an Italian-English dictionary weighs ?

He forced me to come on his "entire sodding family"holiday at Easter and then again in the summer. During this ~~prison sentence~~ holiday I learned Italian by MIL waggling kitchen implements at me, yelling their name, shaking her head and sighing deeply. She told her son, "She has a nice bottom, but you don't marry for a nice bottom".

I think she got it wrong.
My legs are my best feature.

Three years later he moved in with me, his mother went mad(der) and ending up in a locked ward for six months.

I got drunk.

I got pregnant.

MIL went back to hospital.

Son of Thor was born.

MIL went back to hospital.

We survived early parenthood by the skin of our teeth because that child slept a whole ten seconds in the first four years. I didn't take up drinking again after the birth for fear of ending up with another insomniac baby.

I breastfed cos he wouldn't take a bottle. He wouldn't take a dummy either, so I became a walking version of.

I went on to breastfeed for a year cos I couldn't crowbar him off my boob. He was like a fat, pink leech with a suck that gave a black hole a run for its money.
We got married.
MIL went back to hospital.

He went to school.

It all went bent.

We decided to home educate.

Some hysteria followed.

MIL went back to hospital.

Pilgrim invasion began.

I considered joining MIL.

Breaking the bilingual baby commandments

2010-03-25T17:11:00.002+01:00

OK maybe they aren't commandments, but I haven't noticed a shortage of "you shouldn't correct your child for accuracy" statements travelling alongside "you shouldn't force the issue of production."

I came across it so often that I abided by it without question ........... and I really wish I hadn't.

By 7 ish Son of Thor had some seriously ingrained errors which hampered his ability to communicate effectively.

And that wasn't the worst of it

He lost a great deal of confidence in English, thanks to some comments from his British family members (kids in particular aren't known for their diplomacy) and the need some adults have to barge in with criticisms in order to show off their own language skills, or score points against "the other mummy".

Less sensitive people don't mince their words, which can really sting if you are more used to a loving adult who always holds their tongue. In addition his former school had done a wonderful job of cementing the idea that errors were evidence of laziness or stupidity, so the fall out of the occasional, external knock back became incredibly significant to him when it came to his vision of himself as an English speaker.

And not in a good way.

At this point I went heretic and decided that perhaps the reticence to correct for accuracy was more a result of how people perceive correction as automatically a negative thing, thanks to how they experienced it as a child themselves, rather than correction itself being a terrible "no-no" when it comes to producing a bilingual child.

The reality is that error correction doesn't have to be mean, nasty and negative. It can be fun, positive, empowering and provide a form of insulation against the uninvited, negative forms of correction proffered by outsiders.

I've been selective in terms of what we are looking to improve at any given time. Prepositions, past participles,irregular verbs/nouns and word order have all had their time in the sun. They took it in turns because I didn't want to set him up for the stuttering kind of self-correction you see in many L2 language learners, who have had accuracy, in all areas, all of the time, rammed down their throat to the point where it them takes an hour and a thousand tries before they commit to a single phrase.

I've spent a lot of time getting him to see how errors and mistakes are learning opportunities and evidence of a learner pushing the boundaries of their linguistic ability in order to grow. It was vital for him to let go of the idea that making a mistake was a statement about who he was a person (i.e. lazy/stupid/not really English). He had become so risk adverse that it was stunting his ability to take any steps forward.

As a first choice I give him plenty of covert and overt opportunities to take control of his own progress via self correction. How we do it ranges from me choosing my own structures carefully to elicit something specific back from him in a normal conversation, right through to our "secret code" where I make myself literally go cross eyed and he'll giggle and then think back to what he just said. Whatever approach is picked at the time usually results in him setting himself straight without any help from me.

I may or may not decide to ask him to try and correct himself immediately, it depends on the context, some things are better left till somebody has finished having their say and dealt with at another time, when you've had the space to think creatively about how you want to approach it. Plus who wants to interrupt and frustrate an excited smallie in the middle of am account he is just desperate to share with you ?

Where there is a knowledge gap I lean towards learning through discovery rather than spoon feeding, but there are times where for speed I'll stick to insta-provision or the house will never get clean(ish).

I've even been known to theatrically throw myself on the floor, flailing my limbs, crying

"rung!!! rUng!!!!!!! RUNG!!!!!!"

at the top of my voice, because it makes him laugh like a drain, is memorable and deals with any maternal frustrations at hearing

"The cooker has rang ! It's rang mummy, get off the computer, it's RANG !!!! My pizza !!! Don't burn my pizza again !!!!"

for the seven millionth time in a week.

As long as the mood of the activity isn't dismissive or diminishing, I'm not taking anything off the table.

All of the above has reduced the extent to which external opinions can impact his continued growth, his willingness to use the language and his belief in his abilities.

It has made him damn near immune to the kind of comments that previously cut him to the quick and brought him to the point of not wanting to talk to anybody in English except me. He is a polite kid, but these days he is not above whispering to me afterwards "Mummy, she's not very clever, she doesn't know that making mistakes is part of learning".

I can't force the rest of the world to shut up and let him learn in his own sweet time, not unless there is a change the law which allows me to start going around supergluing some people's big, fat gobs shut.

What I can do is get in there first, emphasizing a positive, child centered approach/attitude towards the correction of errors and in my experience it can be a very effective vaccination against a protracted confidence crash.

On top of that, with my child, I'm no longer convinced that enforcing an error correction free zone would have been an effective route to a near native level of accuracy in the long run, given quite how ingrained some of his mistakes had become.

So while I feel conventional wisdom has its place, we all have our highly individual children and circumstances to take into account and it is worth questioning it if you find it just isn't working for you in the way you thought it would.

You can always come and sit next to me on the naughty bench if you break a "commandment" or five ( ;

Check other experiences of bringing up bilingual chilren at the Bilingual for Fun's Blogging Carnival at Multitoungue Kids blog (an Italian mummy doing what we do in reverse, the blog is in English) on April the second.

Do you own a teeny, tiny Italian ?

2010-03-24T11:05:00.001+01:00

Then this one is for you.

Aimed mainly at the smaller mini Italian nationals, a heap of games aimed at giving them further practice in the murky world of Italian grammar and lexis.

Not bad for those of us among the parents who are rather eclectic in our use of accents and articles either.

The maths sections look useful for the slightly older kids too.

http://www.baby-flash.com/italiano.html

Humpitus

2010-03-23T15:05:00.000+01:00

Meeting
Waiting time: 35 minutes
Duration 1.47 minutes

I handed over some work samples, she took them, I handed over reports, she took them, I handed over url, she took it, I asked question about INVALSI, she confirmed it was now obligatory for quinta (5th year elementary), she said goodbye and walked off, I chased after her for her email address, she rattled it off over her shoulder, I can't remember it.

If you ever see me get in a state about one of these meetings again please come and head butt some sense into me or something.

Next time I'll just deliver stuff to the door and leave it with a passing bidella, cos there is no point in hanging around to do it personally.

Knickers well and truly twisted

2010-03-22T23:09:00.001+01:00

/he he he he heeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee/

Just trying to keep my breathing steady.

Idiot Sock Dropper bumped into the maths teacher in the supermarket mid last week.

Unlike me with my superb trolley control and a desire for a quiet life, he did not pull a blithe 180 degree turn and pootle off before presence was noted.

Oh no, he pootled over for a chat.

And between them they decided I should pop in for a friendly meeting tomorrow.

Oh well thanking you both so much for that in the middle of rebuilding the house, a passport drama and a castration.

Upshot is I have spent most of this week not so much as dotting the i(s) and crossing the t(s) as trying to create a super display of such mammoth and astounding proportions that I have knackered myself.

The over achiever in me needs exorcising or I will drop dead of exhaustion.
I just have to purge the showcase of youtube videos some b..asket deleted and add the last few games I made while burning pizzas and that bit is done.

The Egyptian lap book has to be located and the Sumerian cuneiform repro in clay packed in unpopped bubble wrap so I don't break it by dropping in in a fit of nerves.

Then I have to dig out the INVALSI tests he did for the purpose of waggling them at people.

All this and keep Whiskers locked up cos he can't eat or drink till after his marbles get chopped of in the morning (unfortunately vet said no can do on the "two for the price of one" idea and sending the Sock Dropper in too, as punishment for setting up meetings for hard done by wife) as well as trying to work out how to put more water in the CH system, cos I bleed the new radiator in the new (FINISHED !!) bathroom and managed to put the water pressure in the sub zero area. Not to mention that I have to empty the other bathroom (bad news, the pipes in that one are too corroded to do just a cosmetic job so it is bang bang bang there for a month too) and move our bed into Son of Thor's room so they can throw rubble out of my bedroom window at an ungodly hour for a week. Whilst rewiring the sky box into soon to be ex bedroom so it can become living room whilst downstairs floor is being retiled. Whilst setting up kilometers of new fencing for new dog area. Whilst lugging tonnes of stray cement into a lorry to be disposed of. Whilst trying to work out how to fit pantry furniture into new pantry area. Whist working out how to set up the third "half bathroom" downstairs that I have to move (I do not wish to discuss this, it is have to if I say it is have to. It makes more sense and that is the end of it). Whilst berating errant husband for plonking more pressure on me when I need it the least.

If I am this kind of a state over an informal chat anybody want to take bets on the explosive force of nature I will become when it is time for the annual exam ?

On the plus side...you forget how much you have done and how much has been achieved over the course of the academic year so far. It has been good to have an enforced review and being able to think that (despite the panic) to all intents and purposes..we have come a long way baby ( :

But still, thank you goddess of opiates of the masses for a double bill of Greys and Private Practice or I wouldn't be able to switch off at all.

rules for tomorrow

1) be nice

2) smile (not strange rictus version)

3) don't get snarly and defensive

4) don't drop the Sumerian clay cuneiform

5) don't try and show the poor woman everything on the showcase in the educational technology version of a high speed car chase.

6) don't waggle the INVALSI tests with what looks suspiciously like a "na na nah nah na" tone of waggle

7) don't waft the latest report from Whizz Maths with what sounds suspiciously like a big,fat, spluttery raspberry accompanying it.

8) speak Italian not Italish

9) breathebetween sentences

/he he he he heeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee/
/he he he he heeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee/

British Embassy <---CRAP !!!

2010-03-16T11:46:00.000+01:00

Fer crying out loud. It just shouldn't be this hard. I want a lifetime passport, so I never have to do this again.
First they took the passport renewal thingamabob away from Milan and made us go via Rome.

Ten years later and we have to go via Paris.

What the hell is the point of that, make us go via London and have done with it, at least I could sneak in an extra trip home and tell The Sock Dropper that it has nothing to do with wanting to wallow in Tesco's this time.

Chuh.

So anyway, after ten rounds on the automatic message, stupid, rage creating telephone merry-go-round (if Dante were alive today being stuck on that would have its own special, named-and-shamed ring of hell) I finally give in and go back to the incomprehensible website.

Get sent packing from the Italy page to the France page.

Find something about passports and Italy and start trying to work out which form I need to download.

The only one that seems even remotely usable says this

"Form C1: Please complete form C1 if you are applying overseas for your first UK passport and are over the age of 16. ""

It says first passport. Does that mean first as in primary, ie not your second one for visiting countries that other countries don't like, or does that mean the first one ever ? So is this the one for renewals or only for my first ever passport only ? Would it kill you to clearly state which form you use for renewal by using the sodding word RENEWAL !!!!

If I get it wrong the b...askets are going to keep my money and make me start again.

So I want to call and check.

But I don't want to be stuck in "Dante's post modern telephone ring of hell" AGAIN.

Try anyway.

Try very hard not to throw phone on floor. But fail.

Shout "my bloody country !!!".

Which from some people's perspective makes a nice change for a constant refrain of "Jerusalem".

Read form again. Read other forms. Get more confused.

Shout at the computer.

Computer remains impassive and does not leap into an explanation.

Is it too effing much to ask that the sods who create the website and design the application process think about the presentation from the end users perspective ?

Stick a link in for "renewing passport" and leave a clearly defined, step by step trail of links so a person is in no doubt as to which form they need, what they need to attach, where they are sending it, how much it costs IN TOTAL and how to pay.

I could redesign it in an afternoon. Yet with squillions of tax quids all they have managed to do is bugger it up completely and leave people near to passportless status and as infuriated as only PMT mets Maddening Beaurocracy can achieve.

Which is outrageous when same tormented person is facing the trauma of having to get new passport photos and being forced to recognize that birth, marriage, raising a child and ten years has taken its toll.

Godammit.

24 years ago I married a Thai and got caught in the immigration hell they call Luna House.

That was a walk in the park compared to this.

Because it was before the days of Dante's telephone merry-go-round hell.

(takes hammer to phone)

I have an itchy crotch.

2010-03-14T19:21:00.004+01:00

Here is the ad, for the non Italian speakers.

Running late woman arrives, tells women waiting for her, I have an inflamed crotch, I had to go and buy this treatment, that's why I'm late.

Friends condone purchase of said treatment, offering confirmation that they too get intimate inflammation from time to time and that product is the biz.

One woman goes off to bathe crotch in said product, ladies meet up later to celebrate lack of itchy crotch and raise a toast to "kitty taming" powers of product. click to watch the ad

So taking a vote here, how often do you tell your friends you have sore fluffy bits as you explain away your late arrival to a get together ?

You are saying "not very often", aren't you ?

Please say yes.

Or you can forget me ever turning up for a mass expat/homeschooling/wimyn TEFLers get together.

I'm not having the state of another's crotch thrust upon me as they walk through the door.

Thing is, for all the strange things they have ever said to me, my Italian mates have never saluted me with the status of their irritated love zone, rather that say "Ciao, sorry I'm (2 flobbing hours) late".

So I was wondering if I was out of the loop. Were they deliberately leaving me out of the fiery vah-jay-jay conversation in a vaginic apartheid sort of way ?

Thankfully the Italian Mama blogger Equazioni has put me straight, as have the ladies who commented afterwards. They have gone as cross eyed over this ad as the expats.

So please be aware that in your attempt to be culturally sensitive to your Italian female friends, it is neither necessary nor appreciated to lament your labia as a conversation starter, nor will they appreciate you inquiring if theirs is all irritated as an ice breaker.

Oh well, at least this is one ad that doesn't have perky, nudie boobs in it, causing my soon-to-be-bruised husband to get that "rabbit caught in headlights" look on his face...again.

You have to read Litizzetto on the subject.

Slapheads 2 - Students

2010-03-13T23:49:00.005+01:00

A small sample of the slapheads my colleagues and I have ~~been forced to tolerate~~ taken professional delight in teaching.

Silver Spoon Sureeporn

Child of excessively wealthy parents.

Was taught to slap the family's servants from toddlerhood.

Regards all service providers, including English teachers, as serfs and adjusts tone accordingly.

Breaks the laws of physics by looking down her nose at you from the height of four foot nothing.

Little snot typically costs teacher dearly (far more than they earned teaching her) at the dentist, thanks to the level of teeth gritting required to avoid hurling her out of the nearest window.

"I Paid" Pietro

Thinks it doesn't matter if he turns up and takes part in the lessons, or not

The act of buying the course is the path to proficiency in his mind.

When failing to progress or pass, places the blame squarely on "the crappy teacher who didn't teach me anything". Believes his 30% attendance record to be a straw that "crappy teacher" is clutching at.

Abundantly aided and abetted by genius school proprietors who make inspired "guaranteed learning" claims that imply the only effort a student has to make is a swift whipping out of a credit card.

Tightlipped Thongchai

Books a nine hundred hour, one-on-one, conversation course.

Proceeds to respond to every single question or conversational overture with a grunt/nod/headshake at worst, or a mumbled "I not know" at best.

By the 500th silent hour, when an increasingly desperate teacher resorts to pronunciation drills (just to get some sort of sound out of him), marches to reception to complain that he isn't being given the opportunity to practice expressing himself freely.

In terms of conversation, is hampered less by his poor grasp of English than he is by being a personality free zone, who has no opinion on anything, with hobbies that consist of eating and sleeping.

Slimy Sandro

Ten to one specifically asked for a YFT (young, female teacher) and the school obliged with the alacrity of a pimp.

Spends the whole lesson just waiting to leap on any opportunity for a double entendre. Will force one in with a crowbar should opportunity not arise.

Cannot stay within the boundaries of acceptable physical contact. Kisses the hand YFT offers for purpose of handshake. Slobbers on YFT when taking advantage of the local cultural norm of greeting by kiss. Lives for the moment when space is tight so he can squeeze past YFT ..v e r y ... s l o w l y.

If he changes the lesson location to his own premises, is likely to open the door to YFT dressed only in a short bathrobe, insisting that she comes in and waits while he (allegedly) gets dressed.

Relishes the power rush, confirmed by the YFT's evident distress as she find herself between a rock (putting her job at risk for refusing the lesson) and a hard place (worried sick about ending up in a bath filled with sand on a balcony).

Also in this series
TEFL Slapheads 1 - Teachers
If anybody else has a TEFL Slaphead outpouring, send me the url to your post and I'll link it here.

Dear So and So.....redoing the house edition

2010-03-12T23:00:00.001+01:00

come join in the "Dear So and So" meme, cheaper than therapy, twice as much fun than navel gazing.....

Dear ~~Bob~~ Claudio The Builder

Please stop going to my husband and giving him receipts after you pick stuff up from suppliers. Make a hole in the wall, stuff them in, cement over it and then cover with the guilty tiles. It's a cultural thing, the British always do that with their receipts and as one of the clients I insist my cultural sensibilities are pandered to.

Dear Tile Supplier

Thank you so much for sending the wrong tiles. That was really helpful, leaving me only one day to race around Lombardia to find something else that would work. A word to the wise, next time you discover you are out of stock, don't wait ten days and then let the warehouseman substitute the bulk of an order for what he thinks "is more or less the same". Cos he is colour and texture blind and anyway it just isn't on. I don't chose your tiles for your bathroom and you don't chose them for mine. You can forget the pre order for the rest of the house. I'm going elsewhere. Unfortunately elsewhere has turned out to carry the most irresistable tiles that cost a king's ransom...but still. I'm not coming back. I am dead to you. Or at least I will be once the Sock Dropper adds up how much I have speant.

You b...askets.

Dear Italian Sock Dropper

Any minute now you are going to sit down and add up those receipts ~~Bob~~ Claudio the Builder gave you.

I just want you to know that:

I love you very much

You'd last ten minutes as a widower, single dad plus zoo.

I have a very good explanation for the 8 fold increase in the tile budget

It's not my fault (ish)

It will look amazing

AND

I have found a floor tile for the other 180m2 of the house that is half the price of the one we originally chose, but ten times lovelier so I'll claw all the overspend back and then some, but I have actually decided to do the other two bathrooms in the same stuff as the guest bathroom so that claw back will sort of look like it is going "pouff", but you are actually saving money really, because I promise I wont knock anymore walls down and actually with these tiles the value of the house will go up at a projection the exceeds the original projection so really I am saving you money even if it looks like I am trying to bankrupt you. That is a bankrupted illusion. You know how you don't understand the washing machine ? Well this investment in house thing is a bit like a washing machine, to you it looks like just plain old outrageous spending, but in fact...I am making you money. Sort of like a bathroom tile version of an optical illusion. Just like the washing machine you should leave it all to me, trust your wife and everything will come out in the wash.

Eventually.

Lend me your child please....

2010-03-11T17:22:00.000+01:00

Not literally.

Just for a first foray into keypals

Looking for boy/girl, up to about 12ish, in Italian and/or in English, Home educated or at school, in Italy or in the UK/USA/NZ/Oz elsewhere who either likes the idea or can be bludgeoned into it by their mother.

No strings on my part, if it fizzles out I won't be performing Olympic standard histrionics, I just want to see if this could be a viable method of providing authentic written communication practice, as well as for its own sake.

Drop me a line if you fancy letting our kids have a go at writing to each other via their parent's email accounts.

sarahfonto AT alice DOT it

Slapheads 1

2010-03-09T15:08:00.008+01:00

Borrowing this series idea from Mental Nurse,

And turning the spotlight on my own industry,.........................

see also TEFL Slapheads - Students

TEFL Slapheads - Teachers

Just four characters who littered the first half of my life as a teacher, driving me nuts and making a quiet lunch in the staffroom an utter impossibility.

Green Gillian.

Will do four hour workshops for state school teachers without deigning to use white board markers (chemical fumes = air pollution issues), the over head projector (electricity = carbon footprint issues) or docs that can be downloaded by participants (computer screens = Multiple Environmental Sensitivity Syndrome).

When asked by the trainees for some handouts at least she pompously declines "because I like trees".

Has an eco argument that forbids any effort on her part to render her work accessable, memorable or even vaguely comprehensible.

Methodology Maggie

Fell head over heels in love with MLI/Dogme/NLP in ELT/etc./etc. .....and at this point is so wedded to it that a divorce is out of the question.

A touch evangelical to say the least.

Most often spotted regurgitating jargon she doesn't really understand all over newly minted teachers because it props up her ego and most importantly might convert them to her quasi religion, thus promoting her to "guru" status.

Might throw board rubbers at you when you mention that there is no hard data to support her pet theories.

Believes anecdote is the plural of data.

DOS Davina

Became DOS as a result of the "warp speed nine" turnover of externally recruited senior teachers.

Proud holder of a certificate from an online, half-day course in "This TEFL Shite and How You Does It, Like" .

Channels Pol Pot and reduces most of the staff, handpicked to ensure a CELTA free zone, to gibbering wrecks.

Gone Native Nick

Peppers his staffroom discourse with words from the local language, particularly if very few of the other teachers speak it.

With much exaggerated rustling reads local newspapers during breaks, despite only being able to recognize three whole Sanskrit characters.

Lays into anybody who says anything remotely negative about the host country with a rant about xenophobia based on massive generalizations about his compatriots back home.

Has a succession of local girl/boyfriends. Would prefer it to just be one long term one (cos that could lead to the much desired badge of honor, dual nationality), but just as soon as his unfortunate love interest battles through the language barrier they work out what a pretentious git he is and run for the hills.

see also TEFL Slapheads - Students

Steal that meme I will.....

2010-03-07T18:13:00.002+01:00

Saw this one on a teacher's blog, I'm doing it first as an HEing parent and later on down the line I'll do it as a teacher too.

1. I am a good home educating parent because... I haven't swallowed it whole as a "one true way" philosophy. I don't do anything well when I slip blinkers on and get all evangelical.

2. If I weren’t a home educating parent, I would be...still be spending far too much time shouting at the director, arguing (via son's diary) with some of the teachers and yelling "...your bloody country!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!" at The Sock Dropper with alarming regularity.

3. My home educating style is..."Principled Eclectic", same as it in mainstream ed. I select, mix and apply methodologies based on specific learner's short term and long-term needs, motivations, abilities and personality. All of which is subject to change, so a regular reassessment of the approaches employed is needed. I fell head over heels for a single philosophy early on in my career and made it the overarching "King of the Heap", which by definition shoved my students into second place in terms of consideration. You only make that kind of mistake once.

4. Our home educating takes place...mainly in the living room. Yes we do go outside, but it is cold and outside I get harangued about why he isn't at school. I can live with that most days, but I don't want him to have to be exposed to it, he is only 9, there is time enough for him to have to walk into the wind when he is bigger. Plus I like sharing the same rhythm as the rest of the world. It gives Son of Thor more opportunities to meet other kids if we are at places when they are there too.

5. Our home educating learning plans are... prepared on a Sunday night, based on a pulling together of two curriculums, tweaked to his strengths and weaknesses, flexible in the sense that what takes more/less time than planned is given more/less time and constantly being reviewed as we go through the week if I have underestimated or overestimated the difficulty or volume. I don't write full lesson plans anymore, after 20 years I've been doing this long enough to be able to hold it in my head. I just have a folder for each subject and any notes, ideas or materials are put in there in advance to cut down on mad scrabbling in the morning.

6. One of my home educating goals is... to give him as many open doors as a young adult as possible via a quality bilingual education, without sacrificing his social development. That might be three, but they are all in the number one slot, so it doesn't matter.

7. The toughest part of home educating is... him not going to school. I am a terrible parent LOL. I liked having hours of peace to get my stuff done with nobody under my feet.

8. The thing I love most about home educating is... watching his confidence as a learner grow. Like any mother I am chuffed with the tangible improvements in his school work and skills sets, but that less academic arena is where my heart lies first and foremost. It was awful to watch him call himself stupid because of a couple of age appropriate errors in an otherwise well done piece of work. We have a complementary cycle where it used to be vicious, which makes me very happy indeed.

9. A common misconception about home educating is.. that we are automatically "alternative" in terms of world view. I am bog standard, boringly mainstream with no desire to stand out like a sore thumb. To be honest the result is some discomfort at being out of step with the norm (in both HE circles and non HE circles) when it comes to my son's education.

10. The most important thing I’ve learned since I started home educating is... that I would much rather be part of a wider "community" drawn together by mutual attraction, rather than one focused on a single commonality. Which is no big surprise in hindsight, since I came to the same conclusion about over-involvement in things like "expat" clubs and "mother and baby" groups too. I don't want to define big chunks of my time or my life by one single aspect. It makes me feel "ghettoized".

The blackmailing bidella

2010-03-05T10:12:00.004+01:00

full story in Italian

Remember the bidella involved in stripping off the elementary school kids.

Not the first time she has been shuffled from one school to another.

March 2004 - Criminal case - she received a suspended sentence of 10 months and 20 days for trying to blackmail a member of her own family to the tune of ten thousand.

The blackmail appears to have been:

"unless you want something to happen to your children, give me ten grand"

The total consequence in terms of her work was that she got shuffled to another school ... the one where she decided to get kids to strip.

Unless I have misunderstood the article after she stripped the kids she got shuffled right back to the school from which she was shuffled last time.

I feel like I'm tripping reading this stuff.

It's can't be real. It is the cold and flu meds and all a figment of my medicated imagination.

No other rational explanation.

UPDATE
the "shocked and horrified this unexplainable thing has happened" school director from yesterdays school was.....also the director of the previous school where she worked when found guilty of extortion.

I'd have more respect for him if yesterday he hadn't declared himself shocked and instead had said "what did you expect when the level of management above me didn't see grounds for dismissal after her last debacle"

‘’Mi ero consultato con l’Ufficio scolastico regionale – spiega il dirigente scolastico Renato Schettini, che già allora era alla guida del distretto comprendente, appunto, Carpignano e Briona – E mi era stato detto che non si poteva prendere alcun provvedimento, visto che la bidella non aveva avuto alcun tipo di interdizione o sospensione dai pubblici uffici. Autonomamente avevo però deciso di spostarla di sede: l’avevo trasferita a Briona, dove è rimasta fino all’altro giorno’’

I actually feel sorry for the teachers she worked with, I still believe that they utterly failed to do their duty and that should be addressed, but I think it is entirely plausible that they were terrified of the bidella and well aware that the judicial system, in tandem with their own management, would not offer them any protection from the worst she could do to them or their families if they crossed her. They were placed in an unimaginable difficult position. Their priority should have been the children in their care, but in the circumstances there may well be room to believe that they were traumatized. Rather than an innate inability to understand their obligations and perform their role, the cause of their failure to contain the bidella may well have been profound fear. It explains at least why yesterday the director was asking for the teachers to be assessed for trauma and metal incapacity to perform by psychologists. We'll have to see as this story gets fleshed out to what extent their actions were coloured by the situation they were placed in and what the best reponse is to their role in what happened.

We can't undo what has been done.

We can take a long hard look at this and learn once and for all that the constant shuffle as a response to "issues" is the worst kind of solution to rectify the problem of errant employees and demand that from now on a less insane direction is followed.

But don't hold your breath for that to happen at the level of government where it counts.

Evil bidellas

2010-03-04T11:59:00.006+01:00

Another home educator in Italy blogged this story which caught my eye, in the way a sharp stick being poked in it does.

(note the story got worse the next day - see here)

Here's a summary of the news story

original in Italian here

In Brione (NO) (about an hour's drive from where I live) a class of third years had a case of the runs running riot through the class.

Somebody had an accident in the boy's loo, so bidella and teachers sent the girls out of the classroom and made the boys remove their lower garment in front of them to discover the "culprit". Then they proceeded to humiliate him in front his classmates.

From what I can gather at this point there have been no suspensions and I have unhappy doubts, based on 15 years of reading and wittnessing (from the teacher side of the chalkboard) this kind of crap, that all, if any, of the adults involved will be considered unfit to continue in their role.

Sick to death of my profession being picked over an office job or a cashier position in a supermarket, because aside from the job security aspect (and other statale benefits), it offers a taste of power and a status that the former do not have as part of the package. The fact that the kind of power-grab selected is wielded over those least able to defend themselves renders it even more revolting.

Part of the responsibility that we carry as educators is to ensure that what power we have is used with a light hand and with more scruples than you can shake a stick at.

Too often I have worked in schools where over the years a taste for omnipotence has given people a swollen sense of importance and given rise to a warped and unpleasant modus operandi. They infect the newer arrivals who go on to continue the same cycle when they take the role of the experienced teacher/bidella.

Enough already.

A strong message needs to be sent out that no matter how powerful the unions, no matter how water tight your contract, there are lines in the sand and if you step over them you will be removed for the sake of the children that have to exist in the same space. Those lines in the sand need to be shunted to a place more recognisable as reasonable bearing in mind that the needs and rights of parents and students should count for something too, not just those of the employees.

The children deserve better PUNTO E BASTA.

My profession deserves better than to be associated with poor examples like these.

At what point will Italy demand that the rights of a statale/comunale employee end where their abject failure to undertake their responsibilities begin ?

I am not a "school hater" by default just because I am a Home Educator, since I've spent twenty years teaching in schools, it would be hypocritical to say the least. I do a good job and I can offer children an expertise that many parents cannot. The same can be said of a number of my colleagues in Italy. School versus HE is a question, not of "right and wrong choice", but rather a case of "given our current circumstances what offers the better senario for our family".

The parents of children at school, while understanding that nobody can guarantee that every employee, all of the time, will live up to expectations, deserve to know that those who overstep the mark will be dealt with as the situation, not the contract, demands and a cycle of rot will not be allowed to set in the mind set of a staffroom by turning blind eyes or sweeping things under the carpet with spin.

I'd have more respect for my profession as a whole if instead of pleading the case of the colleagues involved they used, at the very least, the internet to protest actions like these, rather than reserving their outraged voice when it comes to protecting their income and conditions of employment.

If you find any outpourings from teachers speaking out against the behavoir and mind set of the employees this national news story, please let me know.

I need my faith in humanity to get a little propping up right now.

UPDATE

Well there is a huge shock, sharing the same mode of operation of some churches, once again the solution of shuffling the problem else where has been employed.

The bidella has been transfered, cos that makes everything better.

This "transfer" the problem is so ingrained that it accounts for the vast majority of "action taken" where there has been a flagrant breach of protocol and obligations.

I personally have had to perform beurocratic gymnastics to ensure my child was not in the class of a teacher I had previously shared a class with, who was forced out of the school by the parents for a level of verbal violence that damn near reduced ME to a nervous breakdown, let alone the kids, and got sent instead to the school and class my son was due to join in the new academic year.

I have no doubt that the bidella was the instigator of this event, however I fail to see how the teachers involved (or aware of her actions, but failed to intervene right from the start) can be seen as "not compromised" just because the bidella was the "ringleader".

UPDATE 2

It appears the senior teacher (guessing this a village school where there is no full time presence of the director) has been suspended. Not sure if it is officially, or just that she has been told to stay home for a while until they can work out what to do next.

Carabinaire looking into the case to see if there are grounds for criminal charges.

This post has been edited because some horrible perverts are getting their rocks off searching for specific phrases, so I took them off and worded it differently. Don't want disgusting types on my blog. Am fussy like that.

.

Sodding cherry

2010-03-03T01:11:00.000+01:00

...just jumped on my hacking cake.

A cold.

A raging cold.

A cold so congesting I have claustraphobia from being in my own face.

I've still got the cough that started three weeks ago. That hasn't finished yet

So now I am off my head on vicks cold and flu meds, incommunicado with my husband who can't speak English and my Italian is of with the fairies and....I have completely forgotton what I was talking about.

Well anyway.

Bloody cold.

And cough.

And cistitus.

And it's the time of the month.

What's next, a broken leg ?

The plague ?

How about a nice dose of ebola ?

Yes, I know I have no sense of proportion, I'm sick and hormonal. Tis allowed.

Anybody who starts wittering about "é la cambio di stagione.." will be shot.

With feeling.

SATs in Italy for elementary and middle school ?

2010-03-02T16:32:00.003+01:00

SATS are coming to Italy ?

Talk about being caught on the hop.

From this June (or May for the younger kids) all students in the following grades will take national test in maths and Italian

Seconda elementare
Quinta elementare

Prima media
Terza media

I have no idea if this is going to become an on-going thing, I don't know what percentages of the final grade the exam results will count for, I only have a suspicion that this is the fruit of the reforms that were put on the table much earlier in the decade.

I did read the blurb on the INVALSI site. I went cross eyed. I forced my Italian, university educated husband to read the blurb, he went cross eyed too. I'm leaving little messages on state school teachers blogs to see if anybody will fill in the gaps for me.

While I wouldn't want to see Italy go down the wholesale "teach the test" route we have seen (or heard about, in my case) in the UK, I can't exactly weep over the introduction of objective, standardized tests here.

One of my biggest beefs when Son of Thor was at school was the inability of anybody to actually give some idea of where the benchmarks were and to explain how the tests they were ~~making up as they went along~~ carefully constructing related to those benchmarks.

From the Home Educator's POV the INVALSI exams means that I have external, objective testing to rely on for three out of the next five years.

Well yipee, cos the subjectivity of internal testing does not make for sleep filled nights. Especially when you get left in the corridor and forgotten about after turning up for appointments and nobody calls you back when you leave phone messages.

I've downloaded some of the tests and feel utterly relieved. The required standard is far more resonable that I had been led to exect based on the level of testing taking place inside the classroom this year. Son of Thor can manage them now so by the end of quinta we should be home and dry. I'm using them as extension and revision aids, stopping to plug any gaps as we go along.

If anybody wants to try them out the ones for the quinta are here and the ones for media are here. (just found a maths one for seconda elementare...... and now I've found an Italiano one for 2onda)

The really adventurous of you can investigate the motives and means here, please let the rest of us know what you find out if you exit with your eyes uncrossed ( :

I still have a cough (now in third week), I'm starting a cold and to add insult to injury I think I have cystitis to add to my woes. Which should put quite some context into the equation of how happy I am am to have discovered these exams.

If I were well I think I might be tap dancing.

I am no longer a slave to how much a teacher or three likes me, thinks I'm mad what whith this homescholing nonsense, or remembers the really detailed letter of complaint I wrote lambasting their second cousin three years ago, which got sent not only to the director, but also to the regional powers that be.

Up yer bum !!!!!

2010-02-27T16:04:00.001+01:00

Am I the only convert to suppositories ?

Not for my bottom you understand.

Its cultural heritage is utterly ingrained and it would go into permanently lock down if I tried to shove medicine up there.

It is still sulking from the unannounced enema nearly decade ago when I was I labour.

But for kids, hell yes.

The first time a really teeny tiny Son of Thor got sick at about ...oh I dunno six weeks old, the ped prescribed paracetamol in little bullet form.

I was about to try shoving it down his throat thinking the these Italians were mad insisting on big pills for tiny babies when the Sock Dropper moved the fastest he has ever managed in his life, yelling "Not that end !!!!"

Half and hour later I was still dithering trying to make an approach, pulling faces, making gagging noises and having a general cultural breakdown.

So the Italian of the family (who had no reason to get all superior on me seen as he acted like a swooning Victorian maiden whenever presented with a nappy that needed changing) lost patience, unwrapped a new one (since mine had half melted and was making a break for the crook of my arm in semi liquid form) and popped it in faster than you can say "bum".

I got the hang of it in the end to the extent that I've been known to beg for antibiotics in bottom form. (They don't make them, the gits)

With the other route to health, there is no extended tussle on the floor trying to get a sticky liquid into a spitting, hissing, kicking and raspberry blowing horror who not two minutes ago was passive and wan on the sofa.

My clothes never get sick, probably cos over the years they have had more medicine spat or spilt all over them than has ever reached my son's gullet.

The other boon is that, when child is in full projectile puke mode, you don't come away from your epic battle to get the meds in only to get it given straight back, at gale force ten, in your eye.

The downside is when you are faced with hurricane strength emissions at both ends you are fighting a losing battle whether you head north or set off south.

Still, overall I think they are my preference despite my high octane reservations in the early days.

They are absolutely Son of Thor's preference.

I only have to mention medicine and the next thing I know a naked bottom is coming at me in defensive, crab style with his mouth pressed resolutely against his knees and muffled exclamations of "only in my bum though, only in my bum".

You know how men expect their future girlfriends and wives to nurse them through the mildest malady ?

Do you think I have set him up to be a serial monogamist, as the women in his life run screaming for the door the first time they ask "do you want to take something for that minor headache/slight sniffle that you have been whinging mightily about for the last four hours ?" and get a big, hairy arse shoved in their face to indicate a response in the affirmative ?

Breaking news for anybody interested in HE Italy

2010-02-26T11:30:00.001+01:00

There is a meeting/conference in BO on Sunday. I only got the info this morning so it is too late in the day for me cos I have plans that can't be shifted, but if anybody else is interested might be worth looking into.

28 febbraio 2010

L' AltraScuola

educazione libertaria, scuola famigliare

COSTRUIRE ALTERNATIVE

conferenza ed incontro per genitori e bambini

Dalle 9:30 alle 17:00

Sono previsti momenti di dibattito e confronto tra i partecipanti sui vari aspetti trattati, racconti di esperienze di AltraScuola da parte di chi la vive, raccolta di proposte e opinioni.

INFO:

.Monica 051 6510109 (eventualm. lasciare mess) info@cropcirco.com

Maura 333 4700945 (pomeriggio) maura.melotti@gmail.com

Pranzo al sacco o preparato dal Ristorante BIO-vegetariano del “Dulcamara” (adulti 12€ - bimbo 7€ )

PER MOTIVI ORGANIZZATIVI E' OBBLIGATORIO PRENOTARE IL PASTO ENTRO lunedì 22 febbraio.

l'incontro si terrà presso la Cooperativa DULCAMARA

Ozzano (BO)

"No Going Back" is a big fat lie !

2010-02-24T20:02:00.001+01:00

"No Going Back" is a a big fat lie I tell you !!!

They waggle picturesque farmer's markets and stone houses restored to their former glory with a budget of thruppence under the nose of an unsuspecting viewing public, with nary a sodding word about the dead cheetahs with hard to locate vaginas.

If they put my life on that programme I can guarantee that the "expat" immigration would drop to single figures within a week.
There are days when I loathe being married to an antiques restorer/dealer.

Aside from the fact he keeps trying to sneak horrible, dark ugly furniture into the house that takes up half a room yet proffers the same storage capacity as a very small teacup.

Also aside from the fact I have to nag for a year solid before he'll take me to IKEA and then he whinges the whole time there unless I distract him with salmon every five minutes.

This is one of those days.

Any normal person clearing out their dead maiden aunt's house would chuck most of it in a skip.

But, oh no, he has to bring it home, into the house and spend hours prodding everybody into admiring it with him.

Which accounts for the slightly stuffed, real ~~live~~ dead cheetah, reformed as a moth-eaten rug, on my living room floor.

Other wives who have been sick for ten days solid get bunches of flowers.

I get a dead cheetah.

It's just not the same.

Whiskers, who has just discovered his (soon to missed) "marbles", is trying to hump the head.

My son is running around yelling "that isn't the Virginia !!!!" and trying to push him down to the tail end.

Oh yes, come live in Italy and be immersed in culture.

Not.

Educational site of the week (Italiano)

2010-02-19T13:40:00.001+01:00

This is for the other parents with kids in Italy at elementary school level.
There isn't the wealth of online resources for the Italian curriculum compared to those available in English, which is why this site stands out. It collates links from all the scattered, limited sites, added to resources created by the blog owner.

I particularly liked the editable interactive games for Italian. They take some of the sting out of the slightly over the top focus on grammar analysis at such a tender age.

Sorry this short and not very informative, I'm as sick as a dog, but the Italian Sock Dropper has a sore arm, which takes precedence due to penis ownership. So I'm ill, knackered form trying to run the house due to several levels of Sock Dropper disability and fed up to the back teeth of incessant male whining.

Ciao Maestra

Easiest way to navigate the blog are the two tables at the bottom of the first page, look at the second table to find the downloadable, editable games for Italian.

Subscription site review 1

2010-02-14T14:30:00.005+01:00

Nothing hacks me off more thinking I am reading a real customer review only to come away with the sensation that actually I am reading an advert. So for the record

1) I do not not do reviews upon request. I do reviews based only on my personal motivation (out of glee or buyer's remorse) to comment, positively or negatively on a service/product I am using.

2) I only review educational products and services that I found by myself without any prodding from the producers, that I have paid for in full and that I have used/am using, genuinely and extensivly, as a teaching aid. I do not "test drive" for the sake of writing a review as blog fodder.

3) I would not accept payment/discounts/freebies from providers for reviews...even if anybody was offering them.

I'm starting on a positive note cos overall this series is not going to be pretty. I have more cases of buyer's remorse than wotsherface from the Philippines has shoes. I signed up to a goodly number of subscription sites thanks to a strong Euro and a sense that I needed all the help I could get...and if I am honest, bearing in mind that before Chianti got me pregnant I was a TELT (Technology in English Language Teaching) consultant as well as a teacher, there was a fair bit of "kid in a sweetie shop - gimme gimme gimme" going on.

My outright favorite, winning by a mile or ten, is Maths Whizz

Review for Maths Whizz

Grades awarded

Dead chuffed
No buyer's remorse
Will renew

If there is one area where I am concerned about my ability to transfer my teaching skills and have a solid enough grounding in the subject, it is maths. Given the trials, tribulations and tears we had with the subject when Son of Thor was at school I wish I had found this service at least a year ago.

I coughed up to use it to supplement our programme, but very quickly it became obvious that it was of a quality that lent itself beyond supplementation and it became the core of our maths curriculum. It acts as the spine if you like, upon which all other activities hang off as a response to a visible need for further practice or additional concept teaching/checking.

What's cool about it

It allows ME to see what a concept is, what the processes are and how to present it to the learner as I hover behind him while he is working on it. So if he does get stuck I know how to help him go over the interactive teaching stage again with some hand holding and targeted questions to aid comprehension, or sort him out with some supported off-line work.

This was a bit of an issue before as I would end up diving into "Maths for Primary School Teachers" and emerging dazed, half asleep and mainly unenlightened an hour later, convinced that I was damning my son to lifetime of maths illiteracy.

It teaches. It actually teaches. Clear, well presented, carefully staged, truly interactive (i.e. they involve and engage the learner) instruction to guide the learner into getting to grips with a new or expanded topic.

An awful lot of services, free or otherwise, replicate what a lot of text books do, a short dry passage of explanation and you are on your own mate. If that was teaching we wouldn't need teachers, just text book writers, plus what it the point of utterly failing to exploit technology just to replicate a text book with a few pretty animations.

I'm really impressed with the amount of thought and work that has gone into ensuring that the teaching aspect is complete, effective and truly a two way process that engages the learner,rather than just lip service. Practice I can organise myself, this was the elusive element I was paying for. I have got my money worth and then some.

Consolidation and review. My child, thanks to nature or nurture, is a bit like me when it comes to maths. We can get it if you hold our hand, but we can't remember it once we move on to something new. At the end of year exam, stuff that was managed fine at the time has flown the nest and one is left high and dry, like the concept has never been met before.

This caused 60% of Son of Thor's issues with maths at school. I knew this was a problem that needed to be addressed in HE and was determined to implement a "regular recycling" model whilst home educating. But it was a damn sight harder than I thought it would be to move from theory to practice in reality. I spent more time stressing over what to review, how often, when and how much, than actually producing anything of substance.

This whole caboodle, maths whizz has taken completely out of my hands (insert gusty blast as hefty sigh of relief escapes). Nothing is left to fall by the wayside and the impact of this constant revisiting has had the most profound effect on my son's ability to retain information and by consequence his enthusiasm for the subject.

Far more than the animated format, this confidence building has been the reason why he chooses maths as the first subject every day (it used to be the last, with some hiding behind the sofa added just to help make me feel inadequate) and why he looks upon it as a fun subject that he can succeed in, rather than the particularly Machiavellian form of boy toture he used to see it as.

Building by degrees. Another issue we had at school was the fairly steep learning curve. As soon as the basic concept had been introduced it was on and up, with little regard for who was falling by the wayside as the complications increased at a cracking rate. Plus increased difficulty would be introduced with only a token attempt at refreshing the swiss cheese memories of the basics upon which the new additions were dependant. I felt like he was being set up to fail.

Whereas I've noticed that, in the Maths Whizz format, the increments of difficulty are personalized based on his results in mini tests and the time it takes him to complete practice games. In Son of Thor's case the programming dictates a steady review of the basics where he has demonstrated that he is struggling a bit, before adding in new information and it does so in "bite size" mode, giving him plenty of opportunity to get his sea legs and gain confidence as the difficulty increases.

My impression is that with Maths Whizz he feels like he is climbing a hill in proper hiking boots whereas at school it was more like trying to scale a mountain in flip flops.

Maybe I am the stereotype cotton wool mother hijacked by the bodysnatcher aspect of the "Italian mama syndrome", but it was deeply painful to see my son call himself stupid and regard himself as a failure. While I am extremely happy with his new found academic progress I am utterly delighted and relived to see him perceiving himself as successful and able. I tried hard to counter his previous poor self mage as a maths learner, but I guess external confirmation of progress means more to him than that of his mum. I think he has clocked on to the fact I am not impartial so my praise is worth less than that of a spider doing a jig powered by java.

LOL, nothing clarifies your place in the pecking order like a weightlifting ant's evaluation being more valid than your own.

I haven't talked much about the animated aspect. To be honest I think while this is what most people think will hold their child's attention and make the subject accessible in my view the reality is that the philosophies and methodologies mentioned above are what underpins the format and makes it so successful.

Having said that the quality of the visuals is impressive. This is no cheapo "pimped Hot Potatoes". What makes this work so well is what is going on under the hood.

Technology cannot compensate for a lack of imaginative, compassionate, principled and effective teaching. The people who created this site get that, they have put the teaching in pole position and made the technology serve it, rather than the other way around.

Overall I have seen startling progress and most importantly enthusiasm and enjoyment, compared to the foot dragging, confused and resistant stance we previously suffered from.

His stamina is improving daily, as is his capacity for mental maths and retention, which was non existent beforehand.

We had a couple of "hot spots" where previously concepts did not seem to "take" at all. All three have budged from their longterm "I'm stuck in quicksand" position and he has caught up with his peers rather than be left lagging behind. In other areas he is now streets ahead.

He is so motivated by seeing his "maths age" go up. That is the biggest buzz for him, going from feeling like he was weaker to seeing himself as "bigger". It's a nine year old thang LOL. He is over the moon that he has overtaken his real age and is now 10 (and a bit) in maths terms, from his perspective it is the next best thing to being 10 (and a bit) in reality.

What I'd like to see added in the future is a side section for parents to be able to use as warmers and coolers, particularly in terms of mental maths workouts and multiplication tables. Not that the programme lacks input in these areas at all, but as a warm up or cool down mini activity I'd rather they were where I could easily find them in a dedicated section. I've banged up some timetables games of my own for daily use, but not only do I have to keep making new games to keep the interest level up I also have to manually keep records to track progress. Having become used to Maths Whizz taking 80% of the maths prep and record keeping off my hands I've become a little work-shy and would much rather they did the slog in that area rather than me.

From a "HE within regulations" perspective this desire for something more has nothing to do with his progress in maths, it's more the recognition that this is one area I will put money on him being rigorously tested on during the annual examination he has to do.

Other than that I'd like to see it translated into other languages (in Italy for example parents send a small fortune on tutors to help their kids with maths, often without satisfactory results considering the massive outlay) and expanded, with the the same thoughtful philosophies and methodologies, into other sujects like English, science, history and geography.

I think the site is a excellent value for money and a really good option for both HEed kids and those at school who are losing confidence or struggling. However, all kids are different so I'd suggest doing what I did and signing up for a month (there is a HE discount btw, which I discovered AFTER I paid LOL) and seeing how you go before committing to a year (which is much cheaper than carrying on with a monthly fee). However I feel it was 100 Euros odd very well spent and I wish I had discovered it before I spent a fortune on textbooks, "how to teach maths" books, workbooks and worksheet subscription sites.

Building disaster 1

2010-02-14T10:31:00.001+01:00

Well it had to happen, you can't redo your home without some horror stories.
Don't worry, it wasn't San Claudio's fault.

It rained in the house.

I walked out of the living room to find myself paddling in the kitchen which has a slightly lower floor. There were ominous sounds from the downstairs bathroom (not the one being done up first).

I battled the raging waters to the bathroom to find the wooden ceiling raining like a summer storm.

No burst pipes.

Just Son of Thor having turned on the upstairs basin tap on when the water was off at the mains so Claudio plus plumber could change a pipe, forgetting to turn it off again, knocking a decorative stone into the basin thus blocking the plughole, the water going back on and a Niagara situation forming as the basin overflowed into the bathroom below. For an hour.

Thankfully these old, old houses are hard to damage. A lot of mopping, the heating on tropical (that is a lot of wood lugging for the mistress of the caminos). And a humidifier being borrowed and all is well. Plus very, very clean LOL.

Hate to think how much it would have cost had this been a modern house full of plasterboard.

Am bracing myself for future disasters that might not be as simple or cheap to sort out.

And removing all decorative items that have plughole blocking potential while son is still small(ish)

Claudio's fatal flaw

2010-02-10T20:46:00.000+01:00

He's a man.

I spent an hour with buckets standing in for loo and bidet, an ex-basin and drawing in the bath with a stick in the rubble.

Yes you can fit in a bath, a bidet, a toilet and a basin.

As long as you don't mind the "crammed in" look.

I haven't just ordered a very expensive polished pebble strip to set off the tiles and the most fabby flooring in the universe to achieve a "crammed in" look. LOL

Not Claudio, nor the plumber nor the Sock Dropper could understand what I was stressing about, but they all liked my solution.

right now the layout in the west wing is like this

But with a little help from Claudio it is going to look like this.

Which means we can go for the full 175cm bath rather than the 150cm compromise one originally ordered (must ring the suppliers in the am actually) and I get to hide the door the leads to the loft from the small bedroom. Which is just as well cos it absolutely sucks warm from that room as well as making it look ugly. and difficult to work out where to place furniture.

I'd rather spend an extra grand and really make an impact with this bathroom rather than save fifty euro's on jettisoning the bidet and spend five grand total for a bathroom that is missing an essential component and has a small bath.

Does that sound reasonable ?

Crash, bang, wollop

2010-02-10T10:51:00.002+01:00

Claudio's final quote for the first bathroom (the guest one, unusable as it was) to be done was so good, so complete, so much lower than the ballpark figures (HALF !!!!!) that I spent Monday in something close to happy hysteria in the bathroom shop followed by similar in the tile shop.

He started work yesterday and now where there was a 1950's bathroom there is a blank space.

Despite not going for cheapo on the tiles (much to the Sock Dropper's disgust who nearly fainted when he saw that the floor ones were 70 euros psm, but I only need 2 sm for crying out loud, not like I'm proposing doing the whole house in the super posh stuff, the rest of that floor will be in a toning laminate) our whole bathroom refit is going to cost the same as my ex best friend's MIL paid for the same sized room with the same work...in 1998.

For the sake of a before and after below is a quck vid the bathroom that has been ripped out...let's just say that I can't make it look any worse LOL

My head hurts though, what with measurements and picking things and too much choice and Claudio going hammer and tongs with a heavy duty hammer drill.

but I love him anyway ( :

The ex bathroom with extra, added ivy.....

plus close ups of utter horribleness...

42

2010-02-06T20:49:00.000+01:00

Both the answer to the universe and everything...and my new age in the morning.
I like my forties more than I thought I would. They came wrapped up in a self-confidence I had kind of banked on getting my thirties, but didn't quite achieve then.

But bugger me, 42 is a big number for somebody who still isn't that convinced that she has achieved grownuphood yet.

Does anybody struggle with the ever increasing numbers ? I mean aside from the grey hairs and the interesting ripples on bits of the body one never knew one could expect ripples on... just the toweringly, huge size of the age.

Am I the only one who doesn't just take it in my stride with a skip, hop and jump but instead feels a little befuddled on how she got here quite so fast ?

Bob da Builda M

2010-02-03T20:23:00.001+01:00

~~Bob~~ Claudio turned up today. He is going to be doing all the jobs on my cascina that will take it from habitable to comfortable.

I've waited five years for this.

Being a persona non grata when it comes to credit (small incident with a Debenhams store card in 1986 and an 18 year old's sort of "free money" delusion) I had to wait for the "money in the bank" option.

What normally happens at this point, (over the years, having been through more builders, plumbers, electricians than a stripper goes through thongs, I say this with much evidence to back it up ) is that they arrive, I am happy they actually turned up, they leave .... and I sink into despair about the next bunch of expensive repairs that are botched, half finished, not what I asked for and done in a way to cost me as much as possible whilst leaving me as far as possible from the result I wanted. AND it looks like crap. Worse than when I started.

Not ~~Bob~~ Claudio.

He is careful, thorough, tells me how to save money on getting the end result I want without cutting corners, talks me out of unnecessary work, aims for a perfect finish and takes the rubbish away with him rather than trying to bury it in the middle of my garden.

Nothing "quatro soldi" about this man.

I may just have to kiss him.

But then he would run away and I'd back to square one with the cowboys...so I will resist.

~~Bob the damn fine builder~~ Claudio il bravo costruttore, exists. And he came to my house.

( :

And no, I am not giving you his number.

He's mine.

All mine I tell you !!!!

At least for the next six months.

What are NON home educating parents THINKING ?

2010-02-01T22:09:00.002+01:00

....about the proposals in the UK to introduce compulsory registration and some form of assessment as to whether a home educated child is getting a suitable education (or not, as the case may be).

I have a poll up at the top of the side bar ---------------->.

I'd really welcome any comments from non HEers to see how they view the argument, sometimes I think the voices in the middle, those who fall well between the very pro-HE and very anti-HE get lost in the kerfuffle, but since I don't doubt that the voices in the middle represent something nearer to a majority position of voters, it would be well worth hearing what they are saying.

If this gets hijacked by people with a dog in the race (pro or anti) I will sulk...and then just delete it with many expletives.

Just for once I want to hear what the nice, and typically very quiet on the topic "wouldn't dream of hassling Home Educating parents in the supermarket or in the post office" gen pub thinks and why they think that.

For me this is an exercise of employing my ears. My gob gets enough of a workout as it is, so listening should make quite a pleasant change and might well be more enlightening.

Facially Off-Putting.

2010-02-01T14:59:00.003+01:00

All those years of being me a mule and insisting that he spoke back to me ONLY in English may have left their mark.

We were in the planning stage of a realistic account during his Italian lesson.

Me - "Great idea, but can you tell me in Italian since we are doing Italian in this lesson"

Son of Thor - "Io...so..sono............stato...NO! ......I can't speak Italian to you. The words come down in Italian from my head but turn into English when they slide into my mouth and they won't turn back into Italian again when they can see your face looking at them !!!!!!" (all said in an utterly outraged tone at my making such an unreasonable request)

He is fine using Italian with me on a word/sentence level when we are working through the masses of grammar and language extension he has to do in quarta, or gong through the Italian books of Sci/His/Geog, but free speaking.....apparently the Italian words have a phobia with regards to my fisog.

He ended up coming up with ideas for the details of the story with me in English and then hiding behind the sofa to write them up in Italian. Presumably to stop my ugly mug scaring the words into translation.

I have a horrible feeling this might make me the "my bilingual baby" equivalent of Joan Crawford.

Which is some feat given that any coat hanger brought into this house gets immediately sucked into some kind of coat hanger black hole the second I put it down, never to be seen again.

Pheonix from the flames

2010-01-30T21:01:00.000+01:00

Did anybody else mourn if not the National Grid for Learning, at least what it could have been.

Well from them there dead cold ashes has risen the National Educational Network.

It is well cool.

Free

And pretty big.

http://www.nen.gov.uk/

taking one for the (pink) team.

2010-01-29T17:01:00.002+01:00

I read a thread in a forum which churned me back up again.

A thread about flashers.

Last spring a man tried to force me off the road I was walking along, he used his Vespa as a threat and in word, tone and deed made it quite clear he intended to have sex with me whatever my opinion on the subject.

Yes I am avoiding calling it what it is.

That's how I sleep.

Most nights.

At just twenty years old he was highly practiced in his technique. There was nothing "first time" or "thinking on his feet" about the sequence of events. That day was the fruit of experience gained over a good long while.

I got away unharmed. Untouched. Thanks to three factors.

1) I'm 42 nearly. Been round the block in several countries. Know how to recognize the smell of trouble and have the self confidence to put myself before the fear of causing a fuss.

2) I'm bolshie and aggressive.

3) A car past just when I needed a car to pass the most. It didn't stop to help mind, just swerved as I jumped in front of it flapping like mad, but it nearly hit him and scared him off.

He was found by the police and arrested because he was so confident he wouldn't be reported that he stayed where he first spotted me. That speaks to his experience of such matters. He looked utterly shocked that I had returned with the police, in a state of total disbelief. That part at least had never happened before.

I didn't expect much to come from what I went through, (which was NOTHING compared to what a sexual assault/rape victim has to bear), during his capture, arrest and the interview process. He'll be out of the country before the court case comes up and the charge does not reflect the gravity of his actions.

Because I got away. Which on some strange level adds a whiff of guilt in my head, like sheer luck and force of will meant I let him "get away with it" to do it again with more success to some other woman. I feel in an odd way responsible for making her the next victim by getting away, so there was nothng substantial to charge him with. I'm horrified that next time he might target a younger, less self-confident woman because the older, self assured ones are too risky. Which could make her outcome utterly incomparable to mine, and not in a good way.

My only comfort is when he goes on to hurt another woman, in a way that I only have to suffer in my sleep, plagued by "could have beens", she won't stand in a courtroom or a police station with her word being doubted, because my word is on record to support her statement.

I could have done with that. He probably started by getting his power/sex kicks in less aggressive or strident terms. Escalation is hardly unknown in men like this, they often start small with "peeping Tom" activities, flashing and inappropriate sexual comments to passersby. Yet we tend to let the "Mr. Inadequate" stuff go and there is no record of it when they progress which can be pointed to as a history. Plus their confidence at "getting away with it" can aid the upping of the ante.

I stood there alone in the police station, I will stand in court alone, have my word against his all by itself. No doubt with my high heeled boots used as evidence against me.

If you see or experience a minor sexual misdemeanor, please report it. People might accuse you of making a fuss about nothing, believe me I know what that feels like. Maybe it won't result in a conviction or adequate punishment. Maybe you will fume and feel awful with having achieved nothing, despite so much costly effort emotionally, given the somewhat off-hand attitude that is so prevalent when it comes to such behaviors

You won't have achieved nothing. You will have flexed the muscle of our collective power. The only one we have.

The power to leave a paper trail that follows a man so he can't diminish a woman twice by saying it was mutual, or invited or didn't even happen. The woman that came before and stood up to be counted by placing a black mark against his name will count for a lot in the police station for the woman who comes after her, particularly if he does escalate.

It will be a hand slipped in hers making her feel less alone and fearful of not only having been violated emotionally or physically, but about to feel the same again because she has nothing but her account of events to back up what many refer to as "her story".

Help give a woman the chance to feel like what she says is regarded as fact not "maybe fiction".

Help stop the salt in the wound that come with successful apprehension of an assailant.

Report it. Albeit "minor" or sucessfully resisted. Give him a paper trail that, one sheet at a time, turns into a ball and chain constantly dragging down his denials, shining a spotlight on his persistence and escalation.

I know it costs time, energy, emotion and dignity. But please...

Take one for the team.

So the victims of rape or sexual assult don't get left to carry all the weight of "doing the responsible thing" on our behalf, all by themselves.

Expat(ish) baby of mine and 2 Rs

2010-01-29T15:03:00.002+01:00

Some of us do and some of us don't.

Teach our kids to Read and Write in English that is.

But for those of us that do, or want to, here are the materials I have used without wanting to throw them against the wall and express buyer's remorse in very stroppy terms.

For early phonics work

Starfall.com, which is free.

For reading/writing

Focus on comprehension (nelson thornes) PLUS TEACHERS BOOK

Focus on writing composition (nelson thornes) PLUS TEACHERS BOOK

The teacher's books are what set these books apart, they really do make the difference. I would expect to spend about a week on each unit even if doing some input everyday, There are so many off-shoot activities included and described. The work is staged to set the child up to succeed rather than throw them in at the deep end and hope they don't sink.

As for level, I started Son of Thor on book one, at nine years old with a grounding in phonics and an ability to decode as well as most sight words under his belt. He learnt to read in English by himself and behind my back but I wasn't too sure of the level plus I wanted to build his confidence and that meant giving him work that he felt he could do. We went through the first book at quite a rate and we are now on book 2 which we are taking more slowly. If you child has had little input WRT reading and the English alphabet I'd start lower with the starter/introductory books no matter what age they are.

If you aren't sure where to begin or are short on time I suggest getting only the reading comprehension book which contains plenty of opportunities to transfer the skills over to writing.

For Grammar/ How language Works

Pupil Book (nelson grammar)

We are now on book 2, we started with book one, and I am glad we did. Again I suggest you take it slow, particularly if the smallie is reacting badly to a very picky teacher at school who is a bit too ready with the red pen and short on noticing what people did get right.

I do use other materials, but those are the best of the bunch as far as I am concerned.

Mouth AND trousers M

2010-01-29T10:12:00.001+01:00

It's not like I want to bling without substance, I home educate because the lack of substance at school was shocking.

But I've been in this profession too long not to know that people's impressions of you as a teacher are at least as important as your actual abilities when it comes to being ~~judged~~ assessed. So I have created a home education showcase to go along with our more traditional forms of materials and production.

If anybody else has a kid in elementary school there might be some useful resources there, both in Italian and in English.

Since I didn't get to show to the teachers who, to a woman, all failed to show up for our meeting and left me standing there in a draughty corridor for an hour feeling forlorn, I am showing it here.

Cos goddamitt, somebody is going to look at it.

http://homeeducationshowcase.blogspot.com/

It's 3 o'clock in the morning, and it looks like it's gonna be another sleepless night..

2010-01-25T07:55:00.001+01:00

La la lalala
Just channeling Crystal Galye here, since I sat bolt upright awake at a time that included a six in the number, and not in a good way.

I'm not sure how long she has been back, feels like she never left.

Yesterday the whole family were crowded round the computer in a form of mini group hysteria planning a new life in Spain.

Closely followed by Cuneo when I objected to the somewhat arid appearance of the bits of Spain they fancied.

And then back to reality.

Our house is currently valued in eurocents thanks to the pilgrims.

Plus you don't get to run away from your responsibilities towards an old lady just cos she is mentally ill, throws things at you and spits like a lama who is in training to win gold in the Lama Olympic Spitting Event.

So in an exercise of mini group positive thinking (hard when Mrs. Glass is bloody more than half empty is on your team) we sat down and worked out how much we'd need to spend to make this house what we want it to be. We have a figure, we have enough cash to do it, everybody is cool with the changes and by the time we finish the guru should be dead (he is already in his 80s and drinks like a fish) so at least when the house regains it's rightful value it will be highly salable should we decided to hightail it to ~~Spain~~ Cuneo.

In celebration of this I tided the garden and the Sock Dropper attacked the garage and wine cellar thingie that has no wine in it and frankly I won't go in that dank, descending hole even if you fill it with Barolo.

Which meant I went to bed early cos I was knackered.

And then woke up at a stupid hour with the IKEA catalogue flashing before my eyes and a yen to find a the perfect wood burning stove to connect to the central heating to give the existing one some much needed extra kilowatts.

I absolutely did not mutter anything about stuffing MILS or gurus into the massive wood burning stoves I found on line.

And if I did it was a green/frugal saving wood suggestion, not frustraton based naughtiness. Perish the thought.

Sheee's baa-acccckk !

2010-01-22T21:05:00.002+01:00

I'm in a heap.

The psychiatric ward ~~had enough of MIL being psychotic despite their best efforts and winding all the other patients up~~ decided MIL was much, much better so last night (NIGHT !!!) they announced she was being ~~booted out~~ discharged this am.

The old people home ~~refused to take her back for bad behavior~~ decided they no longer had a room for her.

So back to her flat five minutes from my home it was.

Ten minutes after she got home my energy levels were depleted to the point of negative equity and jumping off the balcony looked like a really good idea

Shoot me now.

Seriously, if I was a horse, you'd do it.

Bog Off Subito !!!

2010-01-19T19:52:00.000+01:00

That's either Englian, or Italish.

I'm not at my linguistic best when distracted or tired or both.

Which probably accounts for both the confusion and the panic on the part of the pilgrim who, this evening, decided to just wander into my garden and try to use my outside well water tap.

The words (bar one) shot over his head but the tone was uncompromising.

Or maybe my grubby, enraged face and rather eclectic "sparkly day wear meets pajama bottoms meets only one Faux Ugg cos the kitten is in the other one" sartorial elegance conveyed my postition more clearly that I could muster up in actual words.

Well that's what you get when you disturb a woman who is finishing a Mesopotamia roll and stumbling into the prep for a project on "maps, the different types, what they do and why we use them"

At least he can go home and warn the rest of his village that for sure the miracle water doesn't cure madness cos there is a right nutter living at the source.

Heh

Unbalanced resident - 1 (with knobs on)
Pilgrim sprinting in terror - nil

.

Grrrr...Mesopotamia

2010-01-18T22:13:00.002+01:00

Been arguing with this for an hour or more. I've saved it as both finished and PUBLIC nine times. It keeps saying on my dashboard that it is finished but PRIVATE.

Can you see an image below this post ?

And if by some miricle you can, when you run your mouse over it does it make pink circles and when you click said pink circle does it take you to a history link ?

YES ! Lovely person who also gives good advice about mobile phones and kids has confirmed my three weeks of angst wrestling with sodding bloddy Mespotamia (and having something that pulls it together to prove I am not being totally English centric in my Home ed of the squirt to satify the oft leary teachers who will be ~~judging me~~ testing him at the end of the year)...is over.

And breathe

Seriously I was so wound up what with not actually getting the real programme till January that I got in a tizz and it all felt impossible, now I've actually produced something I feel like it is all going to be a breeze. (ish)

Phew.

Right, off to print all the stuff for his file and lapbook and it's one down and ...can't remember how many, but will be about 6..to go.

I hope somebody else out there has a small person who speaks English (for the vid) but goes to school in the Italian system and is in quarta...otherwise this work is for the benefit of just one kid and a gaggle of ~~judgemental~~ evaluating teachers

Not everything shiny is a diamond

2010-01-17T17:32:00.005+01:00

Sparklebox. - A site offering a vast array of free educational aids aimed at KS1 and KS2, widely used by teachers and parents.

I have a bulging folder of their stuff on my hard drive. I've used it with my son in HEd and I've use it at work with kids classes.

But I am just about to delete the whole damn thing.

The BBC reported that the site owner and creator is in prison on charges of pedophilia. For the second time.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/education/8462650.stm

I know my reaction of binning everything looks irrational and illogical. Thus far there is no evidence that the materials were part of a strategy to access children for nefarious purposes *** nor is there anything to suggest that the content of the materials is suspect.****See NB Sparklebox toolbar at the end of the post.

But every time I open that folder I will have to confront a constant association with circumstances that bring out a strong emotional response of feeling sick and a big, hard, spiky lump of sorrow, for the victims of this man, in my chest.

I just can't put any of these materials in front of my son or my little students without feeling them indelibly tainted by the crimes of the man who created them and feeling a need to keep his ilk away from small people in my care, even when the presence is very much in the abstract.

Other people can and should do as they wish with their downloads without pressure or censure, but as somebody who just isn't very good at compartmentalizing things and letting their head rule their heart...I have to use the trashcan.

And resist the urge to spray my hard drive with bleach.

*** edited to add, on other sites it is being said that the site included chatrooms and forums, which I had never noticed, so it is possible that there was an underlying agenda of access to children in the set up if not the materials themselves.

****NB - SPARKLEBOX TOOLBAR

If you have installed the sparklebox toolbar and would like to remove it for security concerns or because it schiffs you out please click here for details of how to remove it from your computer.

Dear So and So

2010-01-15T22:04:00.001+01:00

Dear So and So...the Home Educating in Italy on a bad day edition.

Dear Complete Stranger 1

Yes he is in the forth year. No, not the local school. Oh it's a bilingual educational facility. Err..no not in Milan. Actually it is via the internet...very advanced the internet these days...almost magic....yes the computer is at home. No, he still sees other children/people. I am aware that social isolation could be an issue and since I like him quite a lot being my son and all I have gone to some lengths to set up extensive daily interaction, consisting of both organized and free play with his peers...oh right your bus is here so you don't need to fill the time anymore. Rightio, glad to have been of service.

Dear Complete Stranger 2

Yes the forth year. No not the local school. A bilingual educational facility ...blahblahblah. Oh right so me and "the Muslims" are planning on undermining and sabotaging Italian culture and society by culturally and linguistically isolating our children. I see. Oh no please if you need to get to the post office now you have run out of steam don't let me hold you up. I'm sure I can find somebody else to throw random accusations at me.

Dear Complete Stranger 3

Yes the forth year. Look can I just stop you right there ! I'd love to hear your views on HEing, just not when I am looking for the one brand of passata di verdure that Son of Thor will eat, which the supermarket has outrageously moved from its proper place in this freezer right next to the chips. I shop by memory of where things are and one unexpected shifting of product position and my whole shopping list falls out of my head. I can't cling to said mental list AND find the passata AND manage your need to tell me, right here, right now "Ma ..Signora !! Non si fa cosí !!!"

Dear Complete Stranger 4

Yes the forth year, please don't ask anymore questions cos this will turn into a shocked, horrified silence that is a precursor to the mini-rant of your own choosing...I really have to get to the fag shop and pay ENEL before they cut me off.

Dear Complete Stranger 5

HE'S IN THE FORTH YEAR !!!! WHATOFIT !!

Oh sorry , erm right ...it's ten to 18 o'hundred hours. ...Ahem. ..... Squirm.

I am so glad I am spending the day in Milan tomorow, a break from small town life will be greatly appreciated.

In the meantime enjoy more Dear So and So's by clicking the link and why not add your own.
It's like therapy, but cheaper and quicker.

Not broken hearted

2010-01-15T16:36:00.000+01:00

Small person exited from the cardiologist with a clean bill of heart health.

Cardiologist was a bit put out to be honest.

Kind of got the impression from all the muttering that she thought the pediatrician was off her trolley for having referred him at all.

Only sticky bit was during the chatting to put smallie at ease was when the nurse asked "are you in the forth year ?"

I held my breath, but he remembered my instructions of how to answer that constant question.

"Yes"...with no mention of us doing it at home.

Just as well because the next question was

"Where is your mummy from ?"

Closely followed by

"Well lucky for your English, just as long as you remember to study Italian grammar really hard, cos that is more important, you live here, not there"

Followed by an accusatory look at me.

If she was prepared to doubt my commitment to his education based on nothing more than my dodgy nationality can you imagine the floodgates that would have opened if he had revealed he didn't go to school ?